Richard Lemm "My Class Draws a Blank on Robbie Burns"

If we forget where we come from
we move half blind through what we are.
I ask my mother and uncle, born Alexanders:
What part of Scotland, what clan?
Uncle Curt laughs, "We're Americans."
Not that I want a tartan, or my ancestors'
motto, other than that I first learned,
gimme liberty or gimme death. And Levi's
are my heritage, Disney's Crockett, John Wayne,
but blue jeans came from sail cloths, Genoese,
a Swiss merchant who saw the need
and that new clan of levellers who'd wear
one colour from Tennessee to Oregon.
And here, among descendants of the Highland
Clearances, the Famine, the Expulsion,
the name on lips is Calvin
Klein, and who the hell's Robbie Burns.
I'm glad you're now able to marry
across those old religious lines,
and that your grandfather's ghost won't grip
and guide your hand in the voting booth.
There's too much that needs loving
to wear old hatreds like a gunman's mask.
Roy plugs his fiddle into Peavey amps
and the old lament escapes
Cromwell's sword, while the step dancers'
heads bow down. When I ask my class
the difference between two world wars:
one was black-and-white, one was in colour.
Yet that's more history than my potato-eating
forebears knew, travelling only as far as
their church to hear how God sent boatloads
of food to London as a test for His chosen.
We can have pizza or eggrolls day and night
and this is our glorious amnesia, entertained by
miniseries fragments of India and Rome.
The Shogun, Eva Peron, and Old Possum
dance with Anne Boleyn and out
to the Green Gables store for ice cream
for old Hugh MacAuley's wake. At my grave
I want one of you who can still play the pipes.



South side of Leinster Street, mid-way between Carmarthen and Sydney

Elizabeth Brewster "Where I Come From"

People are made of places. They carry with them
hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace
or the cool eyes of sea gazers. Atmosphere of cities
how different drops from them, like the smell of smog
or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring,
nature tidily plotted with a guidebook;
or the smell of work, glue factories maybe,
chromium-plated offices; smell of subways
crowded at rush hours.

Where I come from, people
carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods;
blueberry patches in the burned-out bush;
wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint,
with yards where hens and chickens circle about,
clucking aimlessly; battered schoolhouses
behind which violets grow. Spring and winter
are the mind's chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.

A door in the mind blows open, and there blows
a frosty wind from fields of snow.


Southeast corner of Orange and Wentworth