Ancestry (Poem)

What is a home?

A dilapidated structure.

Floorboards straining,

fracturing,

molding,

under years,

and spit,

and blood.

Shutters hugging darkened windows,

askew.

A screen door hanging as crooked as a revival pastor,

and the porch sunken to the gates of Hades,

where we can have a sit and sip

with the man in the long black coat.

He visits often.

Ebony tongue flicking the cracks in the roof,

the corners,

the walls,

like a sledgehammer.

Like the shrill tongue of a mother

desperately seeking greener grass over barbed wire fences,

and the judgement and indifference of a father,

set about to never have fathered a living thing

because he killed the man living inside,

like he killed the enemy.

Bc even the foulest trees bear fruit.

Even Grendel,

the eater of men,

had a mother,

a great harpie.

A father,

perhaps,

made in mud and mire,

and the grey bones of dead warriors,

mixed like a clay and fashioned into a man's disfigured hate,

sent to feast upon himself,

these delicacies of iron,

bone,

blood,

and hubris.

And in the wet breaking of skull and spilling brain,

Valhalla is filled with headless men.

Only muscle and sword,

with no eye, ear, or tongue.

What is home,

but a place from which we run.

The first in fact.

Our petticoats held in fists,

skirts hiked to knees.

Children make plans with ancient maps monsters can't chart,

they dream of futures,

syrup sweet like the deep red spill of pomegranate seeds at the corners of pink lips,

and like the greatest of burglars,

shuffle small feet to steal gold,

dragon hoarded,

to make ready an escape.

bvk, 2021.