My grandfather lives in a frame in the living room
He has been there since the year my father stopped being nineteen
The year he inherited his father’s job, his family, his silence
too large to wear comfortably
and no one to ask how, and no choice to say no
But will he inherit his smile?
My grandfather’s portrait never aged
while my father learned, slowly,
the way you build a life without blueprints
brick by brick, room by room, until one day I arrived
and he had to learn something beyond grief:
How to be a father
In the night, he never listened
In the morning, he let me talk
That was how he built his walls
giving in to his grief in the night
and finding the strength
in the morning light
Every morning, I passed my grandfather
wondering about an alternate reality
But his Mona Lisa smile suggested
he had always known how
this particular reality would unravel
looking at us from God’s eyes
Then I turned nineteen and told my father
I wanted to say the unspoken in poems,
or something equally impractical,
maybe movies, maybe both
and my father, who had never been asked,
who never had the luxury of wanting,
looked at me for a long moment and said yes
The man on the wall kept smiling
It seems he had known all along
And now I see my father
finally inheriting
his father’s smile
when he sees mine
NaPoWriMo Day 12 – Finally, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Amarjit Chandan has a pretty wild biography, but his poetry is often focused on place and memory – with his hometown of Nakodar appearing repeatedly. His poem “Uncle Mohan Singh” recounts, with a sort of dreaminess, a memory of the titular uncle playing the accompaniment to a silent film. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.
Smoke words every day. 
5 responses to “[577] The Portrait on The Wall”
tremendously beautiful Rahul. Wow. How beautiful you wrote this. Yes! A winner. Almost, I said almost, made me cry. Thanks.
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Love this…
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A beautiful meditation on inheritance. The ending, with the father finally inheriting his father’s smile, is wonderful.
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This is a stunning poem. The frame as both picture frame and prison; the inheritance of silence as something “too large to wear comfortably”; the way grief becomes a nocturnal ritual while strength arrives with morning light—these images are devastating and precise.
The structural parallel is especially moving: the grandfather frozen at an unchanging age, the father learning fatherhood “without blueprints,” and then you at nineteen—the same age your father “stopped” being—choosing the unspoken as your medium. That’s the rupture across generations.
And the smile becomes the real inheritance: not the job, not the silence, but the quiet knowing that passes from grandfather to father to you, activated finally when your father sees you receiving recognition. The Mona Lisa comparison is perfect—enigmatic, patient, aware.
The final line grounds everything in the ordinary miraculous: Rahul. That’s where legacy lives now—not in frames, but in small permissions granted, small recognitions shared.
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A beautiful tribute that acts as a prism – reflecting multiple points of view at different times in the speaker’s life. The grandfather’s portrait acts like a fulcrum, or the focal point where the poem starts and brings itself to an end, leaving the reader with a warm image of the legacy of a smile.
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