Our DNA, a double helix
is just a way we carry tragedy.
Ancestral sorrow, we re-mix,
a gift unto our progeny.

Most of my grief
is not my own;
The screams of six million
echo in my bones.

My father’s people are The Chosen
And oh! I believed.
I learnt about the pogroms
sat upon my daddy’s knee.

At ten they showed me pictures
of corpses piled gray.
I saw the gates at Auschwitz:
‘ARBEIT MACHT FREI.

My father’s father
died when dad was nine.
Red, the vaudeville carney
made a widow of a bride.

The carnival was on the road
way the hell out west.
My Zayde died in Idaho
and I am quietly obsessed

with what he was thinking
when his heart began to pop.
When it clutched, seized, and stuttered…
did he feel it stop?

Did he cry for his kids?
Did he weep for his wife?
Did he know that he was dying?
Could he see the sky?

My father’s in his seventies
the boy’s a long time grown.
I know beyond the age
he wants his daddy to come home.

Swathes of this terror
are hereditary
and my instinct for pain
has become necessary.

Tomorrow’s sorrows always
stem from yesterday’s.
Perhaps I yearn for burden
to coddle, carry, flay.

My mother’s youngest brother
died at sixteen in his room
strangled by a hammock
on an August afternoon.

David was my grandma’s favorite
of the four she bore
and I don’t think that she recovered
from that sick suburban gore.

I’ll always wonder if he knew
that his end was there,
with that rope wrapped ‘round his throat,
growing faint from lack of air.

Did he hope someone was coming?
Did he think about his plans?
In his final moments
did the boy become a man?

My mother met my father
and sometime in ‘83
she phoned her brother Hoyt
cuz she was pregnant with me.

Now my uncle liked a drink or ten
but his diabetes did not,
so drunk that night he went to sleep
and never did wake up.

My mother’s parents divorced
around when David died.
Grandpa moved to Georgia
and he found himself a bride.

His new wife found a little boy
abandoned, all alone
stranded in a laundromat
and so she took him home.

My darling Uncle Paul
was a very special child.
Touched by angels his mother said,
some said ‘simple’ or maybe ‘wild.’

It was raining in Dalton
on a late December night.
Paul was walking home from church
and someone beat him ‘til he died.

He lay there in the cold and wet
and the rain washed his blood away
and I hope that little boy
went to his God that day.

My family history is littered
with men who died before their time.
I know this grief is not unique
but I have made it mine.

The loss that I have made my own
will never burden me.
What am I, but once was?
I am a vehicle for stories.

I am proud to shoulder
these legacies of sorrow.
Most people in these tales?
They have no more tomorrows.

We are the stories that we carry
and the ones we find in our mother’s eyes.
We are the tales our fathers told.
We are those who died.