A crisis of the ancestral kind
I sit beside a mass. Pulsing
the same air, barely. They’ve changed
their names from song to hymn and
ask for praise in glad sounds.
I lost sight of the string.
Platters of labneh, muhammara,
piled high like columns to an ancient city – this
was never where I came from.
Color drips like a hose that’s not water
tight. It leaks around the source
and slips quietly to soil. I left to
discover something. Become something.
Believe something that feels like a mother tongue.
Insatiable identity.
A road of missing links.
My clasped fingers around a timepiece,
counting the stars in my eyes.
Passing on the path. By and then by.
By and then by.
Ever since spending some time in the outer reaches of Historic Provence, France I’ve been challenged by questions of identity. It continues to show up in my poems (i.e. a poem from a few months ago had the line ‘lineage of you’). Turns out a good portion of my family is from that region and it felt like home in a way that nowhere else has.
After leaving, I began searching for anchors to home in order to root me. I can distinctly remember the way that the album Red-Headed Stranger by Willie Nelson became a soundtrack to the rest of my travels as I explored questions of home, belonging and ancestry.
This poem is a more on the nose exploration of these questions. In college we were frequently asked “What does American mean?” with respect to literature and film. Personally, I’m still puzzling over that question. Given the inability to travel the last few years, I’ve been exploring through food and stories — to better understand different cultures, but also, often, to find my own.