A Poem: Giving Back Grief

I am from a long line of grief

From the tears of women

Of mothers

Of the unmothered

Dark concentric stains, decreasing in size

Like the vantage point of the horizon, the perspective shift of space and time.

I am from me, my mother, my grandmothers, and my great-grandmothers, whom I have never met.

I am from a childhood of feeling alone

I am from the hickory tree, tall with shaggy bark

The rope swing, the wood bench

From the snap and crash,

The world that reached up and slapped me hard.

I am from those I lost

I am from Bula our dog, the first rescue of this marriage,

I am from her exit from her body.

I am from all of those before her

Who I loved

Who I cried for

Who I could not save.

I am from the hot cereal, like cement, my father plopped into our breakfast bowls.

So thick that diluting it with milk made far too much for our stomachs to hold.

I am from the reach to the unknown

The striving to achieve

The ache of feeling forgotten.

I am from the Jews and the Lutherans.

The families that turned away

While they tried to reconcile

Those they loved, with the boxes in their minds.

I am from the grandmother who should my mother marry my father,

Threatened to throw my mother’s younger sister out of the 23rd floor of her Brooklyn apartment

On Navisink Ave and jump after her.

I am from my father’s mother, who married a man with a temper

And did not protect her sons from beatings and whippings with strap and chain.

I am from the delicate and shy pink lady slipper, peaking up from the forest duff,

From the wake we had for my mother after she passed,

Her friends telling of how she called to tell them about that orchid,

A mother they knew, but I did not.

I am from the grief work I did just last week,

The handing back to each generation of women, my ancestors

What I no longer wished to hold

Each turning to face the one standing behind them

A long line, giving back what each no longer wanted.