The Voices Are Coming Up

You are a search party traveling back for your great
grandmother, for years you've been studying Choctaw,
you hear faint directions cracking open, you track them back,
uncover them in ditches of history books, the songs the whispers
of family stories, a name, a date, a town inscribed in a bible,
a page in a diary, homestead documents in a thin drawer,
calling you under the canyons the coasts of California to
Iowa to Missouri, and in your face the clocks are clanging
the docks banging together, wind, waves, and fluid fields
of corn hang over hang under you, you pitch the tents of your
questions. Grandmother, speak to me, you say, and you can hear
her, calling you back for the voices, for the years she's been
chanting Choctaw, not stripped from your family, not lost
to the conquerors, not lost to marriage nor to gods, she's calling
you, your great grandmother, knowing you've retrieved the eyes
to see her, the ears to hear her, her words, to have them surface
the centuries, the years between you, you will crack the dry earth
of silence, tell the stories she hands you, broken stories no longer,
no longer leeched of her truth, her blood no longer sapped from you

Frances Payne Adler ©1998