Though they cover my eyes with the fold, spin me around, and drop me where up is down and here is there, I still find my way back home Michael 2022
Tag Archive: family
I remember one day, when I was smaller than now, my grandmother received a large envelope, ribboned with foreign stamps, par avion She weeps when she opens it and looks inside I ask Grandma, why are you crying? In her broken English she says From Bachory, Ukraine, моя сестра She hands me the photo, a young woman, holding a child in front of large thicket aside a thatched house On the back, in cursive Cyrillic, it reads Noisy are the rustling groves Glance sister at this photo... Memories are there It is signed With Love Kateryna, 26, Ivan, 2 (1910) cc: Chagall 2022
Grandpa would flash a spray of cool water
each morning on the panting gray cement
stones about the yard, colors and hues
of the earth’s minerals flushed deep
brought to life in small puddles
accumulated there near the clover tufts
holding tight in the cracks, the crevices
abutting the frame, the scene at large,
we pan higher than we did that day,
all of our life there in neat little
bunches of boxes in boxes where people we love
carry on, carry out their days, turning on and in
and out and back, to a different way as hope goes,
newly baptized, in deep commune, confirmed, wed to all,
in repose amid the somber hymns of concluding rites,
beneath grandpa’s spray, a flash of silver liquid,
an old man’s giggling face lost in the brilliant sun
of a promise forever solvent.
© Chagall ∞
I was your sister, you were older, I listened,
I thought you knew things I might need to know
even though you often said so very little, and
in the end I want you to know I will miss you,
I am younger, oddly no wiser, I regret you not
having known me better, as I you.
© Chagall ∞
Near a century ago, cousins
from the old country had written
to her, my grandmother, to tell her of
new life, love, old life, and death,
she’d missed, the chronology of
the beautifully handwritten cursive
on paper unlike any I’ve ever seen
in size and touch, with a scent of
many years contained there in the folds and
the unfolding of many reads, here and there
a letter blurred, the errant pen of
the author or a teardrop.
© Chagall 2016
Where do all
the tumbleweeds go
after they’ve blown away?
Where do all
the scorpions hide
during the rain storm?
Watch me now,
James Brown said,
watch me as I bust a move.
Radio
even back then
out there in the desert.
© Chagall 2016
Yes – perfect – place her there,
far from the maddening roar of
the love these two share.
© Chagall 2016
The lights are going out,
not forever – just for now.
We have coffee and tea,
we can make bread if need be,
sing, play cards …
Only for a little while,
only just for now.
© Chagall 2016
The poems I write are like
the dollar bets my grandmother made
everyday needing something
to ride on
Chagall 2016
I fear we’re becoming
people who have no concern
for those who succeed us
Instead we live for the moment
without an obligating sense
to make Gaia inheritable
Similarly there are those
who have no reverence
for those who precede us
Family, tradition, culture and mores
reduce to biology resembling nothing
more than a gene pool
May they drown in the shallow end
Chagall 2016
Alphabet City 