Three Generations           

  DF 01. 19. 2019

 

Somewhere, everywhere, anywhere 

Lives a story of women and their paths 

of a better life they were obliged to dare 

 

The first, locked her five in a room, to spare them

And gave birth to her sixth in a shallow pail

With five mountains crowning the home at the hem  

 

Her husband, not dead-beat but beat nearly dead

Icy wind whipping across his herd of  hungry sheep 

Later, he would weep at the sight of six in his bed 

 

Maybe this is what broke the present from the past

He no longer fetched ice from the peaks for treats

45 km south, this summer was different from the last 

 

Nineteen summers later, she served rose water to me 

After I plucked the newly planted flowers 

From her quarter hectare garden that became my identity

 

The second, spent her greatest youth in that family garden

With grapevine covered terraces, justly unfit for patriarchy 

But if my feet were bare, on cement, he did not pardon

 

To bear someone’s sacrifice that was bigger than their dream

And to gracefully redeem the wrongs of the past for new ones

In this fantastic new life, she chose to leave, to adapt, and to lean  

 

Perhaps she did not carry grace and he never drove for peace  

Leaving her three for a plane, at night, with her breasts barely dry

from the milk of her third, to find him job searching in the streets 

 

Oh, but what a wonderful new world she found for her three to be

In a fantastic life, one in which a lady finds her own glass slipper, and

Liberty is represented by a woman, shipped across the sea, like me 

 

The third, did indeed embrace the luxury to enjoy life

Between worlds, biases, chances, ladders, and ceilings  

With no harsh births, no patriarchal spouse, no strife 

 

She wept quietly when she could spare the time to see

The fantastic person he wanted, she wanted, they wanted 

The woman she is, was, and the one she should be 

 

To bear someone’s sacrifice that was bigger than their dream

And to gracefully redeem the wrongs of the past for new ones  

In this fantastic new life, she chose to question, to love, to glean 

 

And she reaps new memories, now in her acre garden

With cucumbers plucked by her pet white Labrador 

Whose presence and delight became her new tartan 

 

The third spent her greatest years, weaving old flora in with the new 

With the muscle memory of the second, it unforgivably resembled 

The Nirvana of the first, where these new roots grew