Tag: free verse

“Are you sisters?”
“No,” we say,
“But you’re not alone.
We’re often asked that.”

I glance at my friend
Born across the continent;
She has a couple inches on me,
I have more years, and pounds.

But there’s something in our poise,
Our perspective,
Our way of engaging others,
That creates, I think,
The allusion to family.

Perhaps not twins,
But even twins
Are more dissimilar
​​​​​​​Than friends of the soul.

(Last Tuesday these phrases kept running through my head with this prompt, so I just went with another free verse. Sometimes that’s just what works!)

In third grade, in a missionary kid school on the other side of the globe,
My friend Sara and I discovered
We had distant relatives
Who had been enemies—
Or at least opponents.

She had the advantage—Abraham Lincoln touched her line.
My great-grandmother 
had been something like
Second-cousin-once-removed
To the opposition.

I remember my awe at Sara’s brush with greatness, 
Yet I wondered:
How could she be related to Lincoln,
Since her family 
was from Washington State?

I was little concerned over my notorious ancestor.
My teachers read more interesting stories:
Great inventors like George Washington Carver
Who made a whole feast out of peanuts,
And dreamers like Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Whose name I knew before Martin Luther’s.

It was much more interesting that Sara and I were friends
While our distant relatives had fought,
And that somehow the Davis nose
Passed to my great-grandmother
And to my mother.

Relations are sometimes relative.

(No form today–I decided to throw caution to the wind and go with free verse. It was very freeing . I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane, along with some photos for reference. It’s so interesting to me how memories work. Will I be vilified for mine, or does friendship outweigh distant relations?)