A Poem For Today - Tracing The Lineage

[kdick...@aol.com]

Tracing the Lineage

A response to Matthew Shenoda’s poem “Traces”

Inspired to reflect on “the ways we construct a sense of ourselves . . .

in relation to place, to history and to one another;

especially . . . those who remind us that we’ve never been alone.”

I think first of my youngest sister,

taken too soon from this life;

and then of the long lineage of ancestors

who made my life possible.

My great grandmother 

who homesteaded on the Colorado plains,

gathering cow paddies to heat the humble home 

made from sod.

That dirt is in my bones.

And farther back, the Scottish immigrants, 

exiled perhaps from their homes

by the enclosure of the commons,

tearing those simple peasants

from the soil of their birth.

And maybe even further back to those intrepid spirits

who braved the journey north

as the ice retreated from that frozen isle.

And then maybe to those earliest ancestors

who emerged from the ancient seas

to make a home on the new earth.

And all the way back 

to that dust

from those first stars

whose lingering light still echoes

in the night sky.

- Debora Hammond