If there is one thing that everyone can understand and relate to: It's family. We all have that crazy aunt, uncle, grandparent that reminds us everyday how dysfunctional our family is. But we also understand our parents. We also see the little things, from childhood to adulthood, we understand the people we love, and we understand the people who have lived and grown with us. That is family.
In Diane Di Prima's April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa, it talks about her Italian grandpa and thanking him for her growth, for what he taught her. Being Italian myself I understand the grandpa's passion for things, and the way he portrays his honesty. My Italian Grandparents passed away before I was born, but in this poem, I see a lot of what the grandpa teaches in my dad, and in my mother. This quote grabbed me, and reminded me of my childhood:

thank you
for honestly weeping in time to
innumerable heartbreaking
italian operas for
pulling my hair when I
pulled the leaves off the trees so I'd
know how it feels.

These lessons, are hard ones to learn without someone. Even the line: weeping in time to innumerable heartbreaking italian operas, it makes me feel like it is a lesson in passion and appreciation of human ability. Yet this all draws me within the poem to the place, this woman is speaking from the Bronx, which just in name, is conjured up to be a place with a hell of a bad rap. However, looking closer to the language she uses when ever it come up, it makes it sound beautiful. Not only does she describe the bronx as beautiful, she draws the picture of her grandpa being beautiful as well, I can't help but find a correlation between the two. When she is thanking her grandpa, it's almost like thanking him for making her world, the place that she is a better place, and we see that in the language that she uses.

I embrace
strangers in the street, filled with their love and
mine, the love you told us had to come or we
die, told them all in that bronx park, me listening
spring Bronx dust.

She then calls upon writers, philosophers, revolutionaries, immigrants, starting off all italian, then russian, then german, then french, saying "we'll do it for you." She mentions: Dante, Giordano Bruno, Carlo Tresca, Saco and Vanzetti ( Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Niccola Sacco)... on and on, mentioning these great minds. I can't help but think she is adding her grandfather into this mix. As a young child we see the ones who raise us as a just a step below god, they have all the answers and all the lessons to give. She ends the poem, after acknowledging all of these people who have come before them, all foreigners, whom the grandpa speaks of, (thunder your anarchist wisdom at us,) she ends, when saying: we will do it for them, she ends:

We do it for the stars over the Bronx
that they may look on earth
and not be ashamed.

I think this ties in very tightly with place, and people. She's trying to speak of the Bronx in an uplifting and beautiful fashion, as well as revolution, and embracing other people. This is a story of someone thanking their grandfather for teaching them to love, and embrace everything. This may seem corny, or too inconclusive, but what other, more wholesome conclusion can I arrive at? Revolution is love spelled backwards after all.


Bluey aka. Michaela C Ellis