Poetry - Our Story Through History

I wanted to tell a story about me - male and female

Where I came from

Me and my people

The more I read

The more I wrote

I came to understand that I come from all people

The people we call “us”

I alone am the survivor of generations

Centuries, evolution, devolution, and heartbreak

I am the child who lived when my siblings died
I wasn’t drowned at birth or sacrificed

I am the woman who got a husband

Had just enough to eat and had children

I am the one who got away when they raided my village

And was I raped and sold into slavery

No matter, I survived

I was the one with no rights for millennia hiding under a man’s tunic

I was the one that warred against my brothers and together we lost our innocence

I was a Celt with no memory, the druids held our memory and they’re gone now

I was conquered by the Romans and their smooth wine and shiny coins

I held out as long as I could but my beliefs were absorbed by theirs with the birth of my son

Still my church is more Celtic than anyone dare imagine, we just call our gods saints now

I fled France were I lived for centuries; for England because of religious persecution

There I was strong and found favour with the King and the church until

I fled again to the north east, the local people didn’t want us there and burned down 82 of our houses

From there I married a gypsy girl from Northern India and left her for Australia

I hid in the forest in Finland and ate tree bark when the Russians attacked

They were just as brutal as the Mongolians hundreds of years before

I was starving in Ireland, the potatoes had blight, I took the boat half full of

Dead people to Canada over many burials and waves. I lived.

I was the Ojibwa who was told I was heathen by the men in black on my own soil

I was the one they sent up north to work a farm so that I didn’t have to go to WWI

I was the Canadian deeply troubled. I tried to kill myself no fewer than three times

Once my three daughter were sleeping as I opened the gas oven, my husband came home

My youngest daughter married after I had died of breast cancer and it is her daughter that writes this for us. It is her story. She has survived. It is me. And it is you.