Today's poem is by Andrew Payton

Not My Country
       

i.

My father came to this country
through the womb. My mother, too.

Their mothers and their fathers, too.
But somewhere behind them: a crossing.

We dug cabbage and we dug coal.
I kill Chesapeake fish my mother cannot fry.

My grandmothers keep me from trees
where rash and poison live. Things

we do not call by name—we do not,
cannot speak the language of this land.

We drink of its pipes, not of its waters.

ii.

In Michoacán I plant avocado and lime
with my wife, and we play make believe

in tall grass. Sturdy dog, basket of mangoes,
adobe and tejas, June storm in valley, and then—

a baby, my wife nursing in hammock. Now
we carry water and open the gate to measure

our wellbeing in the cherry's new leaves.
I love her in a simple, error-prone tongue,

full of clumsy genders and confused tenses.
Her father names each tree, but the Purépecha

is slaughtered by my settler tongue.

 
iii.

With seven generations of shipwreck
in his lungs, my grandfather sets his chair

in a riot of pole beans and tells me how
to save beehive from locust, when to hunt morels,

how much Chinese paid for ginseng,
and how to dry walnuts. But a country he believed his

cannot be mine: it draws borders through
my wedding vows. He and I are of a scattering tribe

slashing as we go. The sun is set to rise
though no one calls it by its rightful name.

When the river swallows me and we dive
up through marigolds, I will not know to offer song.

Who will know to call our names?

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Copyright © 2024 Andrew Payton All rights reserved
from Shō Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission