l
Cata ogue
I used to take my son to the woods;
at thirteen his body
could pass for eight. He was
small, not white, born
on the coast of a different ocean.
We learn the trees
the way you learn a face,
pattern recognition & proximity.
There’s one we named
the grandmother tree,
her trunk bottom split open
into a low, dark hall
he would climb inside
disappear in her cool moist shadow,
sit in the bowl of earth.
Sometimes, standing there, I’d lean
against her
breathing what I don’t understand.
Who were on these lands before me—
before my wanting
to belong to them?
Above this ocean
not the first, not the last—
all water touching water,
all shores remembering.
I think of Richard Hartshorne—
Who bought a park for thirteen
shillings, a measure
so small I can’t imagine it,
the Lenape people
still allowed to fish & hunt,
as if permission could be given
for their relationship with the land
that had been theirs so long.
What did my own people feel
leaving Ireland—
what did they carry
except hunger, fear, or hope?
Every history I touch
opens like that tree—
a hollow, a dwelling,
a wound you can enter.
How wounded the past is;
every culture has its sorrows
& complicities.
Now language tightening like a coiled weapon:
illegals
threats
infestations
aliens
How easily the mouth
regurgitates past violations.
We’ve done this before,
accused bodies
of offense, legalized
violence as warning.
My son runs ahead,
his small body moving
through light & shadow,
& I think about how quickly
a child becomes an object,
a name an enemy,
how little language it takes
for a lives to be swept away.
We stop again
at the grandmother tree.
He climbs inside.
For a moment
he is held.
For a moment
no one is questioning who he is
or where he came from. For a moment,
I am just a mother who is not
afraid.
