Anna George Meek

---

Ginger Preserves

In genealogy, a curiosity about lines
and what they might make
of us. Where were we

before we were here? My father tells me
that my grandmother invented
for her son the little song

that he came to sing his own daughter
a lifetime before she knew
herself. And a lifetime before the eve

of her wedding, when she gave her father
a jar of ginger preserves, having inherited
his taste for ginger, giving it

as if to say:
I love where I come from.
I know my great-grandmother

burned her skin on the ship from Sweden
because I live inside
that frailty; on the shore

of this century, I´ve arrived too late
to meet her boat. I´m waving my hat, its ribbons
flapping like the loose wrists of children.

Copyright 2007 University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.