Descendants
Emily Stoddard's poem "Descendants" appears in Issue No. 50: What Sustains.
________
EMILY STODDARD
Descendants
restless
for the language
an ancestor spoke
into the sky
of their god,
we sift remnants
of tongues,
break the
breath
we count
in generations
and this is
false math—
the ladder
of my spine
is lined by shores
that were not ours
to fish,
by altars
where we bowed
and altars
we burned,
by prayers
kept
and
killed
&
we are not done yet,
inventing names
for what will save us—
even now,
some speak of doves
and some speak of towers
________
Emily Stoddard belongs to seven acres of ironweed, bur oaks, sugar maples, herons, and hummingbirds in Michigan. As a leader of the Amherst Writers and
Artists Method, she founded Voice and Vessel, a studio that supports fellow writers and creative spirits. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Radar, Dark Mountain, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Pilgrimage, Cold Mountain
Review, The Manifest-Station, and elsewhere. More at emilystoddard.com.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.