Where hay string garlands of glittered pine cones,
cards hung over between,
there was no wedding china
to pass down from daughter to daughter,
nothing like that carried on the boat
from Poland, Ireland, Brooklyn.
If that had been among the family’s possessions,
there would have been no exodus to begin with.
They carried rags on their backs,
some odd DNA diseases of heart and mind
that there are still no names for.
No tea cups to sip from at four precisely,
woozy in dainty parlors where
young girls dream of princes to come.
I settle for flesh and blood,
men without pedigrees, dowries,
year-long tours of the Continent
before settling down to the business of
Father’s business. None of that.
My men attended state universities,
majored in muddling, minored in
generational baggage.
My inheritance can be neither
stolen nor cashed in.
I carry it in my personal electric lines,
tower to tower, repairing wires
as they faulter. No instructions,
no training manuals that give
complete solutions.
I splice, I tape, I move along.
I drink from bare palms.
This is how my world works,
hay string and pinecones for light,
empty baskets where there should be fish,
bowls formed of bodily clay,
as ancestors before me kept themselves from
hunger.
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Long Islander by birth, CHERYL A. RICE has called New York’s Hudson Valley home for almost forty years. She has been a member of Calling All Poets, Poetry Society of Woodstock, Albany Poets, and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. Rice is the founder/host of the now-defunct Sylvia Plath Bake-Off, held from 1993 to 2002.Publications include Love’s Compass (Kung Fu Treachery Press), Until The Words Came (Post Traumatic Press), Moses Parts the Tulips (APD Press), and My Minnesota Boyhood (Post Traumatic Press). Rice took First Prize in the 2016 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize. Her blog is at: http://flyingmonkeyprods.blogspot.com/.
Lightwood 