You believe in open society, big dreaming and serendipity!
You got perspective - a rock cairn with prayer flags.
What did it take to pack up home and family, to travel
treacherous miles - thousands, to be a stranger in a partisan land?
This is the story of your grandmothers, your story too, without
the peril. Bold hearts learn to swim with trouble.
At 12, your Yankee mother sent you to join the school walk
out of Southern Segregation. You were happy to buck the system,
happy for new friends. Fraternizing with these kids fattened a fringe -
cushioned the mean gibes of local cliches and clans.
You linked arms, to carry a fine truth dancing between you:
Life is unkind, life is a mission, life is a mercy.
Your mother was sixteen when the H-bomb dropped
on Hiroshima. Did New England air shake with wails
that ricocheted across the night from Nippon to Narragansett?
The sirens and howls, the hungry ghosts when they nipped the Nipponese.
At sixteen, you watched on TV the horror of napalm on Vietnam,
You wailed the songs of Woodstock, your antidote for the anguish.
These flower power cacophonies cracked a paradigm in you. It was
a time to shed vinyl sided suburban skins, to shift consciousness.
Change your mind, change the world - turn on, tune in, drop out.
You and your mother defied father expectations early.
Gutted with loss, she worked to quell her grief with nursing school.
Hog tied with presumptions, you self-sabotaged to break the spell.
Within you shone a mountain of insight and mettle,
generations of immigrants stacked in groundswell,
as water table, unconformity, bedrock.
Didn’t New Hampshire granite borrow the family pluck,
and return it with a license plate creed?
As your mother watched you pack for college, wearing her red coat
out the door, she felt the wind rise under her wings too.
You’d become her open society, her Aquarian frontier.
She'd cultivated your curiosity, seeded confidence that dared.
When she was 26, she fell into a quest for contraception.
It was 1955. She’d had three babies in thirty-six months,
Her mother didn’t make it past her tenth.
What women want is sovereignty. She wanted to be able
to open her legs and close her cervix. Her grail was a diaphragm -
A rare commodity in a Catholic town.
At 26, you’d had one baby, one abortion and a means to space out the rest.
You took contraception for granted, took reproductive choice as a right.
Your idea of open society was really a call for open hearts,
Did you love the dream and not the journey?
How your mother became your true mirror.
She kept her chin up, poured another shot on the rocks.
You’d tuck a brandy flask into your satchel.
Liquid moxie for the day ahead.
Your quarry, another grail: sexual sovereignty - to love who you wanted.
Even faulted, you were uplifted in the orogeny of a family narrative.
When island people leave the sea, the selkies tend to follow.
They feed your epiphanies and safeguard your seal skin.
You were 66 when you came out to her - took five pages to explain
Your marriage a family institution, a shame castle until the selkies arrived.
She blushed and adjusted her embrace around your shoulders,
At 66, she had a granddaughter to rescue, she shed a parochial skin to slip
into the dilemma. Exfoliation - that which gives matrons their temerity. How
they indulge every bloody blunder like it was necessary to crawl before you run.
Your alpha mother made six kids her prize for surviving a marriage
to an imperious man and living long enough for grands and great grands.
How does a heart learn to be a heart?
You’ve learned mountains command lots of light - the glory
in their faces. Your mother gathered hers in ample measure
and now it spills over you – tessellation of trust and affection.
In that light blooms your open society within her red coat.
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