by Christine Harapiak | Winner of the 2024 Writing Contest – Poetry
Grampy’s First Memory
It was August and hot and 1908
Dad had been gone for two weeks threshing
Hired out
I knew it
Missed his height in the doorway
Missed his shoes in the porch
And Mom she would stop for a moment
Stepping into the yard
Missing his hand on her waist
I could see that
In her face
I would have been three come winter
A little guy, too short for my age
Hiding behind the house
Rolling my tongue around vowels
Trying to take in the English
Not really sure what it was
I was playing in the yard and Mom in the house
Baking bread I still smell
Cleaning blueberries
Scolding me in Ukrainian
For things I can’t remember
Realizing I wasn’t there
She came to the door and stopped
For a moment
Stepping into the yard
and fell –
one hand stained by blueberries
the black of her hair somehow out of place
against the parched grass
she would never get up
I could see that in her face
Generations
I make it onto my poetry contest daughter’s
longlist.
She tries to temper my expectations
but I am pleased
and knowing.
I am not a top poet but
everything I write
smells like home
to her.
I read my fingerprints
all over
her open face.
You make the thousand choices
that is living
and in doing so
you wire these small bodies
to yours.
They can run
but they will never be free
of you.
Someday they will weep
in your absence but your
teenaged grandson won’t cry.
He’ll say
helpfully
“It’s sad but Nana was old
as dirt”
and he won’t understand that
his mother is mourning too
her lost history;
and the very last person
who remembers her small
and fresh to the world
not gaining weight;
set free
with promises to come back
and prove
she could grow –
driving home together
two crazy bunnies determined
to conquer the night.
He will wish one day
that he had cried then
because
she won’t be there
to hold him
later.
Bees Trapped in Amber
My parents are bees trapped in amber
wrong place wrong time
struck down by an ancient flow
oozing from a branch
in the Mesozoic era
or maybe the Pleistocene?
I can’t remember the difference and never paid attention
in that class anyway.
Nose in the pages of book after book after book
still.
My husband turns 60
and I type that out the next day – his age –
as I sign him up for something
some race against time and mortality –
I type a six then a zero and think
my Dad stopped not long after that
and wonder
is this how you get old?
It’s a catching up and if you are lucky
or driving the right gene truck
a passing of the people who went before.
But all roads end somewhere.
I drive myself to distraction
finding all the people who went before me
not my parents
(trapped in amber
suspended in space
gone missing in their 60s)
I jump over them.
I read that amber cannot melt
it only burns
and not feeling the need for a fire
I do a flying long jump past them
a record breaking metaphorical long jump.
I send DNA samples to everywhere
telling myself I am solving for the missing equation
that is my great grandfather
broken beyond repair at Passchendaele
and planted in a foreign field reserved
for Canadians.
My rabbit holes lead me to a distant cousin
who keeps a family history of truth
and a family history of omission.
She says my war hero Grandfather did not belong
to them.
This is a truth apparently –
his strong jaw and neatly shaped ears should have been our first clue.
He came in from the cold somehow
adopted
and I let myself wonder from whom?
Was he the youngest child of his maternal “grandparents”
whose mother fell to the Russian flu when he was 3 months old?
I like this theory
and I build a story around it
shop it around to the family
and the facts stop mattering as much after that.
I keep digging in this bottomless pit of story
and do not stop my quest or question my sources
until I discover eventually
as we all will
I am descended from
the mythical God Odin
because that is what happens
when you cut yourself off from reality –
you become a work of fiction.
And it’s no longer history
and it’s not really art
and we wander around the planet
insisting all our stories can be true
at once
leaving no ground in common.
I stop digging down with Odin
and start looking up
and see the bees in amber
where I have trapped my parents’ story
and build a small fire
to set them free.