Family
–Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Water has no memory
and you drown in it like a kind of absence.
It falls apart
in a continual death
a hundred-gallon tank as
innocent as outer space.

 

Earth remembers
facts about your relations;
wood passes on patristic
characteristics,
bone and feather,
scandal,
charcoal remembering
and every stone recalls its quarry and the axe.

Photo by Victor Malyushev on Unsplash