Dear Ancestors

Dear ancestors:

When did you learn cruelty?

When did you learn to live with

Fearful fealty to the stories of pain

Passed down through your veins?

.

Your roots, mother.

Your roots, father.

Grandmothers.

Grandfathers.

And all those who came before.

.

Dear ancestors:

When did it start?

With the famine?

With the ruined roots of potatoes?

With the hands that blighted them?

With the fleeing that came after?

.

With the replacement of the homeland

With the new land across the unknown sea?

With the new language that replaced the

Old one that died on hungry tongues?

.

Dear ancestors:

Do souls die when mother tongues die?

Do voices go quiet in wooded tombs

On this side of the Atlantic, where

The women aren't named on the gravestones

The sons they birthed built?

.

Is that when the cruelty took root?

With the forgetting of women?

With the women's names replaced

With the men's names, and so erased?

.

Your roots, mothers.

Your roots, grandmothers.

And all those who came before.

.

Dear ancestors:

When did the silencing of our mothers

Become dangerous to our daughters?

Was our un-naming our undoing?

.

Tell me, dear ancestors:

When did you learn cruelty?

All those who come next want to know.