Birdfoot’s Grampa

In the first stanza, the reader meets the old man through the perspective of a first-person speaker, who refers to the car in which they drive as “ours” (Line 2). Through the title, the reader can assume that the speaker is Birdfoot and the old man is Birdfoot’s grandfather. Bruchac deliberately makes the age difference clear at the beginning of the poem to emphasize the experience of learning that takes place in the poem; had Birdfoot been older and more mature, they would already know the lesson they are about to learn, making the whole poem moot.

Bruchac uses hyperbole in the second and third lines to communicate that the stopping and starting has been frequent and to illustrate the impatience of the narrator. They may have stopped only two or three times, but it feels like at least “two dozen” to Birdfoot (Line 3). The toads are blinded, and their blindness is a symbol of their helplessness and dependence on the old man’s intervention when he “gather[s] into his hands / the small toads” (Line 5). The speaker compares the toads as they leap to “live drops of rain” (Line 7) and connects the toads to the natural environment, bringing to life the imagery of their small, wet bodies slapping onto the asphalt. This image also helps the reader to understand that there are a lot of toads in the roadway. The stanza uses line breaks in such a way that the lines feel choppy and that the message they convey is interrupted and broken. This technique allows Bruchac to illustrate, both in an auditory manner and in a physical manner on the page, the frustration the speaker feels when the car stops again and again.

The second stanza presents the youth and impatience of the speaker. The speaker reminds the reader that the rain is still falling, but there is Grampa, out there with the mist lingering about his head. The whiteness of his hair is a sign of his age, and the stillness in the mist stands in contrast to the falling rain. The mist, like the toads in the last stanza, gives the reader another sense of the natural environment in which the scene takes place. Grampa is outside the car, in the mist and rain, illustrating his connection to nature while Birdfoot is still inside the car, shielded and separated from the surrounding nature. The speaker has told Grampa repeatedly that he can’t “save them all” (Line 11) and that they have “places to go” (Line 13), but the subtext of Birdfoot’s protests indicates that he feels their tasks are more important than the loss of a few toads.

The speaker presents the final stanza in quiet contrast to the second, tempering Birdfoot’s impatience and giving space to the valuable lesson of his elder. Grampa’s hands are “leathery” (Line 14), indicating that he has had a long life and illustrating the brownness of his skin. The reduction of the toads to the broader, more abstract “wet brown life” (Line 15) provides a striking image of all living things encapsulated there in Grampa’s hands, where they are protected and safe. Grampa then moves into the grass, blending even further into nature as he stands “knee-deep in the summer/roadside grass” (Lines 16-17). Grampa’s smile illustrates his patience with the speaker’s impatience and his understanding that Birdfoot is young and not yet able to understand the bigger implications of a life’s time on Earth. The poem ends with the crux of the lesson—that all living things have a place in the world and that no one creature is paramount. On initial inspection, the enjambment of the “to” (Line 19) and the “too” (Line 20) might look like Bruchac was simply breaking up the repetitive sounds of the words. However, by moving that “too” down to its own line where it provides a punctuating full stop to the poem, this final word puts a heavy beat on the idea that the toads are just as important as himself and Birdfoot.