Helen wore pink until Dar died.
After that only purple.
For eighteen years, she told me:
After I’m gone, don’t forget. I loved Dar until the day that I died.
And she did.

No one gets it right all the time.

Turbid with oil and absolution, covering
our crops, our homes, our graves, water
comes in sideways in the wind winding past the grave
sacramental bread and whiskey
split for sharing at the wake of their son
whose last day was also his first.

From the front pew at Saint Joe’s,
descendants of one of the other four children who outlived Dar
and Helen, we anoint one mystical vine and its branches.
We are heartily sorry; detest all our sins.
We examine our grievous quaking faults; search the desert
sky and await a resurrection.

The common ordeals and personal tragedies,
crack open the crust of abundance for us to see the purified silver
and gold of new generations, the firmament of family albums.

Or maybe that’s wrong too. How will we ever know?

We structure our beliefs around
bricks and stone and stained glass
and Irish eyes, blue skin, black coffee,
big feet, hairy backs, broken arms,
Dad’s smile, Grandma’s diamond ring,
holiday bread and a photo of the mimeographed recipe for it,
a bicycle spoke bracelet,
testicular cancer, breast cancer,
granite stones with blank dates.
Dates filled in.

Clay feet.

Copper angels.

Stone wings.

Plans for Thanksgiving leave time
for leavening and baking, stuffing,
cookies and bread,
the family photo, football,
dirty dishes,

naps,

a walk to the park.

We citizens of parentage and wedlock, adoption, brotherhood, and sisterhood.
We ardent apostles of ancestral lands,
We inherit the potions and proverbs comprising a theology of family festivities and movable feasts,
where
we practice and test fondness and devotion.

By Easter, Helen’s bread
will have risen. Baked and sliced
for sandwiches of leftover ham.

For one breath, we’ve gotten it right.

Reflecting our truth and love, our faults
and flaws, our grudges and glories,
descendants and ancestors, the giver
and the gift, what we have done and what we have failed,
to receive,
each morning moon washes bright our biographies
but leaves marks on the binding. Lest we forget
keepsakes and heirlooms —

a bedroom set, gold flatware, Dar’s
watercolors, Helen’s
rosary, missed
embraces, calcified
tears, tipsy denials, depression
glass, gray hair at seventeen, arthritis,
perfect handwriting, china dolls,
a saint’s name, an aunt’s name, the name of a lost son,
one brown fleck in gray-green eyes, and the dough
and butter stains on
Mom’s replica of
Dar’s version of
Helen’s Holiday Bread.

These sacred reminders, raised scars
for us to touch and tend
and never forfeit.

Can this be true?

Compilation of all our forebears,
each of us always more and less than our chromosomes and customs:

The habits and heritage
of warriors, sinners, and snakes,
of carpenters, farmers, and saints,
of seamstresses, teachers, and nuns,
of shopkeepers, accountants, and priests,
of janitors, wardens, and maids,
are bygones to examine, weigh, and pardon.

I dig into past transgressions of long ago parents of parents of people I never knew. Watching me judging
them from heaven or hell, do they judge me in return as I forge my own failings and fame? If I cannot make
them demigods, neither can I make them daemons.

If this is true, have mercy.

Accolens eleison.
Amicis eleison.
Familia eleison.

In the depths of faith tested by the rising of timeless heartache:
The sacrifice of a mortal love sprung from flames
of fatal flaws and incurable humanness —
Radiating recognition of each new absence —
Laden in light of ancient kin —
Brimming in western dawn —
We ascend the bluff edged in ether and moss
to daughter our days. Our misted celestial elders
veiled in twilight dreams crescendo into breadth of heaven.

Linda M.J. Muller

This poem first appeared in Voices, Spring 2018 a collection of writing from in and around the Writing Center at the University of Iowa.