Member-only story
Connections to Our Forefathers
A poem
My father showed me a book of poetry once, published in 1915,
bought 15 years later by a woman whose name I cannot fully read,
(A_n__t_ Me__i_____, 1930)
which somehow found its way to my great-great-grandfather’s hands,
(Soren Jensen, 1874–1945)
and then later my father’s,
(Ronald Jensen, Jr., 1971-present)
and then mine.
The pages are delicate and browned with age,
but I can still see where someone marked
meter and inflection in pencil long before us.
I trace my fingers lightly over the dusty lead,
with the eerie sensation, I am excavating bodies:
page 41 — a femur;
page 207 — a rib;
page 356 — a vertebra;
page 571 — a heartbeat.
Inside the front cover,
there are three things of note:
a sketch of the tattoo on my father’s;
a list of poems that inspired him; and
the prayer card from his grandfather’s funeral
(Lloyd Jensen, 1913–2001).
