Remembering Another Grandpa with a Poem
Today is my Grandpa, Harvey Spaulding's birthday. He has been the topic of many of my poems. I loved him so much and he lived two hours away from me in Wisconsin. He was an important person in my life and he taught me so much. He was a great storyteller and a comedian.
This is the two of us in the late 1980s. I'm wearing blue shorts with a bearskin rug wrapped around me. My grandpa loved to go hunting and this was the first bear he shot.
The poem The Right to Bear Arms was published in 2016 by The Fem online literary Magazine.
Here is the link to my published poem: The Right to Bear Arms
The Right to Bear Arms by Laura Kozy Lanik
My grandpa taught me how to shoot a gun.
He took me raccoon hunting at night.
and we baited the black bear in the daytime,
driving the back 80 dirt road in a rusty blue truck.
Our gun rack hung in the bathroom,
the bullets in the kitchen drawer.
The 8 point buck I shot on opening day,
trailed blood for a mile before I found him.
I rode the yellow bus to a private Catholic school in town,
sitting next to my seventh-grade crush, John.
On a crisp Fall day,
John found his father’s loaded rifle hiding
in back of the coat closet. He called his friend.
They met in the woods behind 7-Eleven,
where his friend pointed the gun at him.
He pulled the trigger and
John drowned when his lungs filled with blood.
I never went hunting again.
-Laura Kozy Lanik
It made my grandpa very sad that I never went hunting or shot a gun after John died.
This was a major turning point in my life. Thanks for reading.
