A Different Happy Life
I used to picture your passage from
Italy
as one long brutal trip in the
swilling
humanity of the ship’s hold.
It turns out not all stories are so
dark,
and your family was wealthy enough
to secure you a cabin. You drank
lemonade and played shuffleboard on
the
sunlit journey to America.
You left behind the doctor you were
to marry
and the nana who loved you
and the green mountains by the
seaside
where cerulean waves crashed
over the rocky shore near your
summer home,
a getaway from your family’s
vineyard
before the looming war and
your dear papa’s ambitions took you
away.
It would be two generations
before you returned by way of
the photographs I took, the closest
you would come to that life and
those memories, living so many
years
in a home filled with love and
many other happy memories, infusing
the air
with the scent of tomatoes and
garlic.
Even if stories are not dark, there
is sacrifice
and loss, so I wonder if you spent
your time
alone imagining a different happy
life,
the one you would have lived if
you hadn’t taken a course charted
by others.
The same way I sit in my happy home
and
picture some other happy life,
fulfilling dreams
I barely allowed myself to dream.
Lisa McNeilley, PhD, is married to her high school
sweetheart, with two children and a monster-dog. She is co-author of DB
Cooper and Me (Principia Media, 2018) . She also wrote Need to
Know: A College Success Workshop (Caffeinated Press, second edition
forthcoming), drawing on her academic experience to help students, often
first-generation and low-income, manage the challenges of college. Lisa serves
as president of the board of directors of Write616, a non-profit dedicated to
supporting writers and the literary arts, and facilitator of the Cascade
Writers' Group. She was editor of Imagine This! An ArtPrize™ Anthology for
three years. This is her first foray into poetry, though she wishes she had
started honing her skills years ago.
Tags:
Poetry
Strong work from academia. Amazed and impressed.
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