The Scattered

1. Wander

What would a child know 

about crossing an ocean?

Bravery is secondary emotion

when you are forced to go.

The movement of migration addictive

a geographic cure.

This leap becomes a scattering.

Scions dividing,

multiplying.

Accents quickly tossed.

Traumas left unspoken.

Pledges taken, 

broken.

Narratives forever lost.

We are bad at remembering.

The look,

their laugh,

the whistle,

the way their gaze could hold.

Their fears, and feelings,

secrets never told.

Their sigh,

a cough,

the long exhale.

An imperceptible wink.

Few tears or grimaces.

The lighter side of cold.

Jokes often repeated,

but still no stories told.

Hometowns burrow the mind

a place for the scattered to wander.

Green ribbon-festooned once a year—

more mysteries the next will ponder.

2. Carry

A long way away from the other side of the sea,

a long way from your hard-working town,

I try to remember what I never knew.

What did you pass on?

I want to imagine you connected to the land,

You were from the old country, after all.

Did you wander deep in the forest?

Did you fish, or hunt, or forage?

There is only one photograph of you,

a face that’s weathered with candid exhaustion.

It wasn’t your idea to dig into the earth

until the walls gave way.

Far from the mines and the company town

Far from the graveyards you dug.

Your name carries an imagining,

of a lifetime that never was.\

3. Remembrance

Are we meant to flow

like liquid tossed on parched earth,

slipping through cracks unnoticed,

swimming in the concrete of ordinary,

carving our initials into the void?

Under a coffin of ash,

the roots beneath Pompeiian gardens

defy time.

An impression,

a stamp,

a mark,

just an idea,

they were there.

No temples erected, no monuments to revival.

Their simple existence—their futures’ survival.