Ancestor Poem by Laurence Overmire

I touch this stone
Barely legible

My great great great great grandmother

The face I’ve never seen
Not even a picture, no photograph remains

But here you lie
Your bones beneath the ground

So close, my journey so long
To find you here

This quiet field
Hot summer’s day

We spend a moment
Not as brief as it would seem

Enough perhaps to know
You’ve been here all the while

And I, in the return to this
Sacred place

Regain some lost part of myself

The future a little less forbidding
The same sky, the same sun, the same story

Related
All over again.


(Previously published in Red Coral, Spring 2001)