Naming Home

And, I remember them,
those ones, blood and kinship
and like-minded pooled from the genes,
which came before me, and I remember them
through tendon and muscle.  I remember them 
through the thick of it.  You know, who they were 
coming at me, soaring through flesh and bone 
to come resting and whisper all the secrets 
of the past out through my fingers.  

And, when my grandpa MacLeod
(my fathers father) came to Canada
he came, like most, over water.
He didnt mind at first because it was the same ocean
hed known all his life.  The same waters
hed fished in, the very same.
So, he told himself as the Isle of Skye
left his sight, and how he knew hed never see it again,
it would be alright for he would still
be next to the same waters.  The waters
hed always known, but he left Halifax after a fortnight
and had to tell himself, in Montreal, the river
was connected to the waters hed always known,
and hed laugh at himself, drunk and thick with love
for an Irish woman with a shock of strawberry-blonde hair.

And, he left fishing behind him and tried his hand
at farming in the rolling hills of northern Saskatchewan.
The nearest village had wooden planks as sidewalks
and dirt and mud for roads.  And, he stayed
long enough for two sons and one war.  When the war
was over he and his two sons and his unfaithful,
Irish, Catholic, slut of a wife left the rolling farm-land
of Saskatchewan and all the men shed spread her legs for,
parted her freckled thighs, behind them.  And, he told himself
that the land of British Columbia stretched and linked itself
to the land which touched the Saint Lawrence river in Quebec,
which winded itself to the ocean, the waters, hed always known,
but when he took my hand, five years old I was, and pushed 
it into the Pacific Ocean he told me, I have never felt
so far from Scotland.  And, I felt the strange, unfamiliar
territory, my fingers felt the foreign and named it home.

© Heather Simeney MacLeod