Heritage

Painting by Howard Terpning

Heritage


From my mother, the antique mirror
where I watch my face take on her lines
She left me the smell of baking bread
to warm fine hairs in my nostrils
she left the large white breasts that weigh down
my body

From my father I take his brown eyes
the plague of locusts that leveled our crops
they flew in formation like buzzards

from my uncle the whittled wood
that rattles like bones
and is white
and smells like all our old houses
that are no longer there. He was the man
who sang old chants to me, the words
my father was told not to remember

From my grandfather who never spoke
I learned to fear silence
I learned to kill a snake
when you're begging for rain

And Grandmother, blue eyed woman
whose skin was brown
she used her snuff
When her coffee can full of black saliva
spilled on me
it was like the brown cloud of grasshoppers that leveled her fields
It was the brown stain
that covered my white shirt
my whiteness a shame
The sweet black liquid like the food


Linda Hogan