The Promised Land

— my hands have grown weary from clutching at the shoulders of the sun.
my father was the great-grandson
of a father I didn’t meet I couldn’t speak to — with his back bent over the brown dust of a house
he had named for his own — burying his body like a second shadow between the grass stalks
and my name was not there in between the gap of his teeth.
a mother
I never knew was a woman not from here — born cradled by a horse-drawn carriage
built from the bones of her grandmother's river raft floating across the shore of her eyes
coming to her own sealine — a golden cusp of wheat crowning the horizon where the rising dawn lay.
her children’s bare feet across the amber earth — the pale soles like seashells
her hands — his hands — open to praise the hope of an ocean-wide sky.
so she came with this father and those children with forgotten names — I remember
my great-great-grandmother in the graveyard her face in a photo given by a stranger — made of the folds of the dried roses atop the stone overgrown by pastures gone too sweet the fences gone soft at the edges —
and my light-skinned palms are bare from the harvests I have yet to reap – beyond the wish to blend in further than the bridges of my wrists —
with the curls of my hair twined lovingly by the fingers of my ancestors
— my own hands holding more than empty skin. carrying the earth of a community built between the wide sun and the sky — my shadow laid upon the grass — a horizon of a home I never came home to — swallowed by the soil — but is waiting for my return
my blessing is my return — to their smiles I never saw
but take upon my own lips — all the same.