Inheritance
Diane Macklin
Mom brought her Southern hunger
fried okra poke salad pecans and black walnuts
Encrusted in her grandmother’s cast iron skillet
Forged from Delta blues
toil weathered hands choppin’ cotton knotted
Mom stole away riding Greyhound to New York Port Authority
Escaping Mississippi’s troubled waters
white-hooded death night canters
She unspooled Southern lilt from tongue
currency for northern deliverance
All the mothers before
marrow moan “Free at last, Thank Almighty! Free at last”
into each womb knit soul
mixed kneaded rolled out
foraged sustenance
scrapped from necessity’s barrel
flour sack shift dresses and bedsheets
water pumped out back
stewed wild onion and rabbit
Aunt Sadie’s grape preserve on scratch-made biscuits
Mom nursed me
on optimism’s milk
Raising her ancestral dream
Scrap metal heart
tool and die cast oblation
I scoop handfuls of sun
Savor its sweet blaze
glowburning beneath my ribs
exhaling precious embers
We rise and fade too soon
About the author
Diane Y. Macklin has found refuge in stories since childhood. She is a professional storyteller, teaching artist, and emerging writer with a Master of Arts in teaching middle school English from Simmons College. In 2000, she was called beyond the classroom walls into the ancient art of storytelling. She has performed from Massachusetts to California; and her written work has received honorable mention for the Passager Poetry Contest 2024. Her life and career are centered around “Making a Difference, One Story at Time.”
Beautiful Baltimore, Maryland, is her current home base.