Prologue
Once
Meteors punched through the crust of the earth
and fire burst from rigid rocky peaks
Continents shattered and ocean-beds were dry
The air breathed sulfur and phantom pain
The world knew yet no life.
Earth came into this world the only way it knew how
Screaming.
Pockmarked and disfigured and burning.
There are people
Whose names did not scar the earth—rather,
Whose letters, lightly traced in dust
Across a burning road on a summer day
Were forgotten beneath the footsteps of the next traveler.
Knees that bent and backs that broke under the weight of too many sunsets.
Shaking, calloused hands that sowed the first field.
This is how people look.
Shredded and bursting at the seams.
Bulging and blossoming.
Cracked and slippery,
Freezing and searing.
These are people,
pockmarked and disfigured and good.
We came into this world the only way we knew how.
People
Whose backs bent and ribs cracked and feet broke
As they carried you to your destination.
A thousand tangled lives
Which ran together under the heat of the working day
And melted into a single memory.
Crawling rats and blind fish and specks of life adrift in darkness and something else before that, too.
These strands which unspool behind you like an endless road:
A great tapestry unfurled at your feet,
within which you are but a single stitch.
This endless prologue before your chapter.
The path behind you is thick with blood and water.
Thousands of pooling puddles
from which life sprang.
Until
Your great-grandmother,
And her mother,
And her mother.
Feel their lives behind you
Unspooling like an endless thread.
My mother
And her mother,
And her mother:
These people
Took what they were given
And still, demanded more.
What a strange thought.
That you should carry their lives with you.
Your heart beats like the rhythm of a forgotten song.
How did you forget?
About—
This empty legacy you bear
in your ribcage, in your fingertips.
How easy it was to forget.
You are the product of a thousand lives.
This is the tome you stand poised in front of,
Ready to leave your print on these faded pages,
To live the only way you know how.
You are more than a legacy.
You are a destiny.
Your fingers drip with dark ink.
Give them something to remember.