Legacy by Carol Barrett

 

Image | Jill Wellington

Legacy

​(after Ted Kooser’s poem of the same title)

I’ve spent almost fifty years trying to encourage you 

with the poems I’ve written, to remember my people 

as if they’d been yours – moments tart as licorice root,

with my parents, grandparents, brother and sisters –

knowing that one day we’ll all be gone, and without

memory, the poems I’ve written will have to go it alone.

I owe my people so much. I want them to shine forth

like heavenly stars, each with its own brilliance, its own

trajectory, my father climbing a cedar slat ladder

to pick cherries in the orchard, mother’s hands already

mired in flour, my grandmother stomping her feet

by the new TV for a homerun, bottom of the ninth,

my uncle pursing his lips to a silver flute, my aunt

winding her dark hair in a figure eight, which will fall 

in a veil of sheen at eventide, and when nudged aside,

will reveal another slim neck, one perhaps birthed 

in your own bed of quilts, that child now dancing 

in a field of daisies, twirling warm and free in a red cape. 

(Italicized passages are from Kooser’s poem.)

© Carol Barrett

Carol Barrett

Carol Barrett has published three volumes of poetry, most recently READING WIND, and one of creative nonfiction, PANSIES. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol supervises creative dissertations for both Antioch and Saybrook Universities.

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