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Making It Up As We Go Along |
by Barbra Nightingale
I am a gringa.
I have no other language
but the pictures I make
with my words, my hands
punctuating the silence
like pale birds at dawn.
My family goes back
only three generations
and the last is tattered lace,
my culture woven
with a skein of tears.
Who we are is who we evolved.
No one throws stones.
There are rumors: on my father's side
my great grandmother a healer;
some say a witch, telling fortunes
with an egg. I don't know how.
On my mother's side, only a name,
six orphans in a Home.
There is nothing remarkable
in their crossing, no Cossacks
or sinking rafts, no one left
to burn in the ovens of Poland,
freeze in the Russian winter;
all but Yiddish lost from their tongues.
I am a gringa, whose grandparents
born here had parents from somewhere else,
but no one lived to tell their tales, no one
listened or remembered to ask.
I am a twig, flung in the air,
washed by the sea, taken root
in this land, and all that I know
has been learned lying
with my ear to the ground,
listening to the dead murmur
their stories at last,
these words that are mine, for them.
Barbra Nightingale has had over 200 poems published in various anthologies and journals including Mississippireview.com, Barrow Street, Kansas Quarterly, The Georgetown Review, MiPo, Ocho, Kallipe, Calyx, and Many Mountains Moving. Her sixth book of poetry, Geometry of Dreams, is due out in June 2009 from Word Tech Editions. She is a professor of English at Broward College, near Ft. Lauderdale.
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