Your family has one too.
A scar carried on the skin of its name.
Fading over time. But never erased.
Discreet, then raised and red
in the allergy of memory.
A public secret, registered,
earnestly brought to the attention of God,
published weekly by the faithfully inquisitive
who attend Baptist prayer meetings in the village.
It was passed down like an unwelcome heirloom,
this portion known as “poor,”
on both fronts, pity and poverty.
The story: my father’s father,
forced off the old land, ran from the “Reds,”
lost all, but saved his family.
The old fate followed him to the new land.
A new form of traitor, a trusted agent,
whose facility with English on paper
stole ten years of work and a full section of good soil.
Landless again, grandfather took shelter from his mind
in a ward for “nervous breakdowns” —
the horizontal dance of the overwhelmed.
My father (not without the strength of grandmother),
carried it. Became provider.
Barely seventeen, yet learned to stand
in such a way as to hold himself up
under the weight of a lack,
greater than many burdens.
Grandfather wandered the ward
searching for his shed, his tools, his tractor,
asking always, “Who can I trust?”
Heard always my father’s answer,
given as taught, “You can trust Christ.”
My father worked away, a hired hand,
then married, happy
with a small patch of land clad in rocks and roots.
“He’s seems better,” said mother one day,
grandmother gone, grandfather now living in a house in town
that smelled of compost and sardines and unsaying silence.
And while he set his table with loss and resentment —
produce from a farm that never was —
he had time, in the end, for his grandchildren;
until the day, gangrenous and unsteady,
my father led him around the pit outside his step
to the car that drove what was left of him
to the city hospital.
But rage and sorrow over betrayal does not leave with death.
It’s soaked up by generations, tilled into the soil,
harrowed over until the rot turns rich,
perhaps to raise a better crop.
