Across the Great Divide

I Come From

http://www.bajibot.com/case_citylore.html

Citylore, a wonderful organization honoring the poetry of everyday life in all its many forms, started a poem postcard project for everyone, as a way of crossing The Great Divide. The prompt is I Come From:

I Come From secrets I will never know,

from one grandmother, Anna, a fabulist, who lived next door

to Rosemary Clooney’s mother, and from another,

Rebecca, who spoke only a little English, who

stood too close to the ground. Both grandfathers were

dead by the time I was born, and all I know of them

is mythic and unreal. Shmuel Markovitz was a butcher,

outgoing, overweight, a man who played cards with other men.

Oscar Cohen, learned enough, owned a men’s clothing

store in a small Connecticut town. What they thought

and thought about I will never know. The children of

Anna and Rebecca married. The two matriarchs never

got along but they pretended, the way people in families

often do, that everything was OK enough.

I come from the tradition of wanting truth

but telling a story, an imperfect story, instead.