[Excerpted, adapted, expanded from earlier poems for Grandma Hall]
[For reading at her memorial service on 9 September 1987] 
  
ROOTS 
  
You are my longest, strongest root, 
  my closest link to a lengthy past 
                and a heritage  
    that has fascinated me
      for as long as I can recall.
  
Your legendary father is mostly a blur in my memory 
  fortified by photos and revealing artifacts.
All I can recall of your mother is a funeral  
  that I fancy I attended,  
    'though even that vignette
      may be only childhood fantasy.  
Yet they cast their shadow in you 
  and it has extended to me, and mine.
  
How much of what I feel, I am, comes straight from you, 
  whether at my mother's knee or by your side,
    I can no longer tell; 
But it is clear -- beyond dispute --
  that a crucial part of what I am is tied to you 
                       and to our common past.
  
How well you have connected me! 
  I entered other worlds through your eyes. 
Were we really, somehow, part of what happened
    in earliest New England?
Does Indian blood really flow diluted in our veins? 
Tinkers and explorers,
  Yankee peddlers and frontiers-people, 
    teachers, fighters, builders, thinkers, poets --  
Were these truly the stones in my foundation? 
  Or are they mirages of a wished-for past? 
Whatever is the fact, they seem to serve me well! 
  
My love affair with history --
  'twined with my occupation as with my leisure hours --  
Is no mere product of the academe.
My need to tinker, using hands but also mind, 
  comes not simply from th' depression's clime
  or from a formal education's boost. 
  
When I stop to seek the reasons why --
  as far as my perspectives let me see -- 
You stand supportingly on my mind's horizon 
  helping thoughts to gell and words to flow. 
  
We both are Yankees, twofold! 
  (you've taught me well, you see)
With active hands attacking, solving
  life's insistent needs
    with economic and efficient strokes,  
And active minds exploring -- 
  recovering and perhaps sometimes enhancing
    a past through which we become and mold 
      who we are  
      and who we want our own to be.
  
You helped us all to measure up 
  not only on the well marked post in feet and inches 
    graffitied on your living room door 
  but in facing the highs and lows of life itself.
  
You shared with us your hopes and joys
  the worlds of nature -- 
      birds and flowers, trees and vines -- 
    in what remains of pristine state 
    or domesticated by the gardener's trowel; 
  crafts of hearth and home --
      of workmanship that bears its own reward -- 
    on festive family occasions 
    or a cold refreshing drink for a laboring lad;
  the finer arts -- 
      of sight and story and song --
    not only the rousing staccato of marching drums 
    but the times of quiet reflection at the end of day 
      at fireside or gathered 'round the piano -- 
        how we loved to sing! 
  
You made it all so interesting. 
You made it all so enjoyable. 
You made it all so natural. 
  
In a very real sense, 
  you ARE my past -- not simply IN my past -- 
          my present -- though most times we are apart -- 
          my future -- if values such as these are to remain. 
Though you have left us now,
  the dust of your frailed body 
    recycled to the ever beck'ning earth, 
You have not REALLY left us.
The sprouts that grew through you 
  in all these many ways
    live on and take new forms
      in this complex tree of life. 
  
You were -- still are -- my longest, strongest root:
  undergirding
  nourishing
  sustaining
Somehow helping it all to hold together 
  in this frustrating and fragile,
    yet exciting and entertaining world 
      that you have loved and left to us. 
  

Robert Kraft
at the funeral of his maternal grandmother,
  Margaret Miller Northrop Hall
Wolcott Connecticut
completed 9 September 1987