Jul 01, 2014 19:54
132 years exactly
separate us on this day.
You, 21, freshly arrived
in the country where
I will in 88 years be born.
I wonder if your eyes
that scan the horizon
are hazel eyes--
my father's inheritances
two generations later?
If your body bears
the fat genes that will
engulf me and if hope is genetic--
if that survives long enough
to be my legacy as well?
I wonder what you would think
of your life, in slips of paper
birth and death bookending
marriage and censuses?
Of this paper no longer pulp
but light and dark
electronically delivered
at a search, at a click?
No picture of you survives. No memory in the mind
of anyone living can say if on that first
of July the wind blew through your
brown / blonde / black hair. If you stood
tall, or slumped, if you carried a valise
lifted with ease over a strong back
or a bundle, carried weary.
Is your face my face?
Would we recognize each other,
blood call to blood?
As you stand there
and I sit here
can you imagine
as I imagine
time stretching
both forward
and back
Can we know each other, in passing?
Can you love that you have never seen
as your bone, your blood, your future/past
Can you be immortal, if only in retrospect
in the whisper trail of clues
you and I will both leave behind?
Has anyone before
wrote you a poem? Will they write one
for me, when I am like you--
memory, paper, and dust.
family tree,
relatives