Ancestor

You came four generations
before me. Can you ignore
the separations and adore me,
my patriarch? You who made
those pencil marks
on old yellowed papers
when they were still white.
I run down the calendars
tonight to meet a man
I'll never know. I hold your
candlelight at the depot of
years where tears froze on
pages, where genes span the
ages to search for approval.
What a terrible trick of time,
our forced removal along the
line of chronology.
The irreversible biology
of a gene strand, a known land
made strange, at the DNA
interchange. I hold your hand
tonight, greatest grandfather man.
I can almost see you write, feel
the story you began, never
to finish. Your anguish, my own
familiar fears in your handwriting,
a blur, a uniting. Two pamphleteers
aspiring to greatness, fearing
obliteration, the awful annihilation,
as if we never lived.
You never made it dearest grandpapa.
Never were distinctive. The masses
never screamed hurrah. There's only
me. I finger the dust, I see.
I open the cages, scrape aside
the rust to free, to defrost
the tears imprisoned on those pages.