Inheritance

Leila Shebaro
| poetry

 

dilapidation on the lawn
we watch without sorrow;
a chair, perhaps
is the irretrievable earth

 

appraising, I think,
this came from my father’s country
where bricks are the color of melancholy,
but of course it’s much older

 

what drips from this furniture,
stinking old, waterlogged,
carted over by our docile forebears
who fled the land, like monks moving icons

 

what does it hold
but foreboding, ignoble imprints, strange oils
from ancient hands, and dust
dusty water, disgusting

 

Leila Shebaro lives and works as a writer in North Carolina. This is her first poetry publication.

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