Poetry

by Scribe Leaf Library · 3 min read · 2 views

I. Departure My grandmother folded her whole life into two suitcases and a woven bag, left the mountain village at first light before the roosters could object, or brag that she was leaving. She told me once the hardest part was not the goodbye — it was the ordinary Tuesday months before, when she first let herself ask why she was staying. That question, once let loose, could not be caught again, or reasoned still. She packed. She left. She had no other use for a life that had stopped fitting her own will. II. The Ship Three weeks at sea, she said, and half were spent retching over rails with strangers just as sick, strangers who became, by voyage's end, the closest thing to family, thick as blood despite no blood between them shared — a Greek widow, a Sicilian boy of ten travelling alone, a couple who declared they'd marry once they landed. Even then, even seasick and afraid and far from every fixed point they had ever known, they built a kind of temporary star to navigate by — each other, less alone for having found each other, briefly, there, on water that belonged to everywhere. III. Arrival The harbor didn't look like what she'd dreamed. No golden gates, no chorus, no grand door — just grey and noise and men who barely seemed to notice one more ship from one more shore. She stood in line for six hours to be seen by officials who mispronounced her name so badly that she let the mistake convene into the name she'd wear from then — the same small erasure that a thousand others bore in that same line, that same grey hour, that day — a person renamed at exactly the door where their old life was asked to fall away. She kept the new name. Kept the old one too, just quieter, just folded out of view. IV. The Years Between She raised four children in a language not her own, learned it from radio and school notes sent home in her children's hands, a seed slow-grown from soil that never asked her their consent to be planted there. She worked two jobs, then three, sent money home to parents she'd not see again in this life, though she wrote faithfully, weekly, for thirty years, a litany of small news — weather, work, a grandchild's name — sent toward a village that, by war's end, sound economics, and simple time, became a place that no longer quite existed. She found herself belonging fully to no shore, a citizen of neither, and of both, and more. V. What She Left Me She died at ninety-one, still speaking two languages fluently and neither one completely, still mixing them the whole way through sentences that started in the sun of her lost mountain and ended in the cold bright vowels of the harbor town she'd made her second, truer home. What she told me, near the end, still hasn't fully weighed itself out fairly in my mind, not yet: "You will not understand this crossing's cost until you've made one of your own. And yet I hope, my darling, that you never lose what I lost making it — not the pain, not the debt, but the particular grief of choosing what you choose." I carry two suitcases still, unpacked, in the shape of her stories, not her things — the weight of a woman who never looked back without also, somehow, looking forward. She sings, still, in the part of me that speaks her tongue badly, gratefully, imperfectly, alive — the long crossing not finished, not yet done, still being made, wave after wave, to arrive.