Dust (Poem)

By Amirah David

Do you know your great great grandmother’s name?

Do you know your great grandfather’s source of shame

or even your grandma’s favorite childhood game?

These days we both care about and take for granted what will surely become stories handed down at best,

but more often become stranded in the dust from which they came.

I don’t even know my great grandma’s maiden name.  

I know she birthed her babies alone on a farm and washed their clothes in a barrel with her sturdy arms.

But I can’t picture her smile or her tears.

All lost to the years that swallow the way we can swear it all matters.

This day, when the special vase shattered.

This day when they watched too much TV while I soothed my tattered nerves.

This day when life plans changed one too many times and I stayed sadder than you all deserved…

These days are all numbered.

These bodies we abuse to make the pain slumber.

These bodies such a wonder that they can feel joy and pain and break and heal again.

These bodies…they too will go to dust.

And all we gushed our hearts into at great cost -

will be stuffed into a keepsake box and under layers of attic dust, be lost.

And even so. 

We feel we must keep on with the paperwork.

With with the busy work, the groundwork, the housework, the homework, work the networks, pack the workbags, stuff the swag bags, fight the jetlag…

And then there’s an attack, or a crash…

And we are violently dragged back to the smack dab center of the matter...

That all that matters is when I took a breath and didn’t yell at her.

How you held my head in bed because you knew it fed me.

This is not glamor.

It’s the way we chose to dance while doing family chores instead of using force, 

or the time a whisper or a joke or an act of sacrifice moved the rage off course to make a new way.

It’s the humbling fire of day to day facing the mire of passed on sin 

and praising God for the little wins that add up to someday loving like Him.

That is the heart of the matter - 

When all else shatters - we are left with the pictures of how we touched or hammered the precious hearts in our midst. 

The mothers’ and fathers’  babies who, for a purpose, God himself knit. 

How will we love God and love them?

That is the commandment.

That is it.