‘Grandmother’ by Ray Young Bear deals with a bond of love and affection between the poet and his grandmother. Though the grandmother is no more in the present, she is alive in the memory of the poet because of which he often remembers her. In this poem drawing three pictures of grandmother, the poet suggests the images of his grandmother as all loving, all caring, and all inspiring person. In that sense, this poem can be interpreted as the poet’s tribute to his grandmother.
The poem begins with the poet’s recollection of the past when his grandmother was alive. In the beginning of the poem, the poet draws a picture of his grandmother holding a plastic shopping bag and wearing a purple scarf. He claims that he could recognize his grandmother even from a mile away because of her bag and scarf but in reality, the identification of the grandmother by the poet was possible because of the bond of love and affection between them. As both of them were connected to each other in terms of souls, the geographical distance didn’t matter. In the first picture that the poet draws in the beginning of the poem, the grandmother comes in the image of a loving person.
The poet also remembers the time when his grandmother used to return home after working in the field. She would place her warm and damp hands with the smell of roots on the head of the poet from behind and the poet without turning back, could identify those hands as the hands of grandmother because of the warmth of love and care that he could feel on those hands. The picture of the grandmother offering a gentle and loving touch to the poet implies her image as a caring woman. 
Towards the end of the poem, the poet shifts from the loving and caring image of grandmother to her inspiring image through the use of metaphors. In the previous two pictures, the grandmother was alive but in the third picture, the grandmother is dead. After her demise whenever the poet feels depressed, he visits the grave of his grandmother and imagines her speaking from the grave. In this act of imagination, her inspiring words help him get rid of his depression and make him helpful. In this regard, the poet uses three metaphors: wind, ashes, and fire. As wind removes ashes and makes fire visible, her inspiring words remove the depression of the poet and fill him with optimism to move forward in the course of life.