My grandpa is a mountain, Brooding, looming, tall. I stand in his shadow, silent as a stone. Rattling rusty paint cans, He gestu
res toward the shed. I gape. That sheds a squat grey mushroom, Needing more that paint to fix 1 In the first stanza, what is one key detail about grandpa and one key detail about the speaker?
2 What clues do these details give you about the speaker's thoughts or feelings?
3 Use the details to find the author's message, or theme. What is the theme of the poem?
1. You can see through the comparison to a mountain, that the grandpa is tall and always there 'looming' (hovering) over the speaker. You can see that the speaker does not speak much around his grandpa, as he is "silent as a stone".
2. These details show that the speaker is impressed by his grandpa and looks up to him the way a stone would look up to a mountain-it shows that he hopes one day he will grow to be like his grandpa.
3. The theme of this poem is shown through the way the speaker looks at his grandpa and the shed. The shed needs more than paint because it is so old, which relates to his grandpa and the theme of growing older.
