In response to the prompt to create a poem in the voice of an object, I revamped an early draft, allowing one of the ancestors, whose pictures and memorabilia are kept in a drawer, to speak. Her name was Anna Elizabeth Sears (Doolittle).
Boxes of Silent Lore
Stacked and left in a single drawer, we
Wait for discovery. We are
Meandering memories bumping against
Pictures, snippets of 8mm,
Old letters, brown and fading
Crumbling albums of glue and gloss and loss.
Boxes brimming,
Drawers and bins
Shuffling ourselves
Each time the searchers ramble through us
To find a clue about some long dead ancestor
Or one recently remanded to heaven:
mother, child, landscape.
Oh, here are pictures of me,
a great-great-great-grandmother now.
I was married that Christmas Eve, age 17,
wearing a lovely handmade dress.
Here are headshots of my many children,
some still babies, some stillborn.
Here, I stood on my porch in Tulare, age 42,
In dark cotton and holding a broom.
Here, an aged gray head,
dressed in silk and black lace, reading a book.
Piled up under these glimpses into my life,
My divorce proceeding,
court report, receipts,
old deeds to little farmland houses.
Each image appears to be about to talk,
but remains silent, reserving judgments,
resentments, nods of approval.
In each picture, my hands are still,
In unlikely repose.
Those were the hands that
Milked and plowed and sewed,
Kneaded and whipped. They wiped the
Tears of my children, and later
Pulled my granddaughter from her mother’s womb.
The face that comes to visit us in the drawer
Looks so much like me, especially her hands.