Cellular Memory

My great-grandmothers memories are living 
inside me; cellular memory.  Osankas fear 
murmuring through me, and Osankas dread 
whispering inside me.  And, I am forgotten to her.
I am unremembered, but if I could pack 
the one bag she took out of Russia with her, and if 
I could board the train out of the Motherland with her,
well, then I would not be misplaced in the generations
coming after in a world she would never understand.
Its language always second to her and its land forever foreign.
A small, brown, leather bag and a train ticket she worried
shed forgotten at her grandmas house, but found
on the way to the station slipped between the pages
of a book she planned to read on the train.  The plot lost
in the panic of leaving, the winter months bearing down,
and a boat waiting, after the train, to take her 
and her parents out of Europe and into a new country.  
I remember backwards to the way she folded 
her white, cotton nightgown, and I remember backwards 
to the way she laced her shoes, and I remember her, 
the thinness of her limbs, the way she limped slightly
(a fall down three steps to the bakers shop on the corner)
the way she limped to the station.  And, I remember her as she stepped
up to the train, the way she favoured her left ankle,
the way she didnt look back, the way she didnt look 
from the window to the cousins and aunts waving at her
and her parents as the train pulled slowly away from everything
shed known and it lulled her, like a baby, in its great arms
and it rocked her into a future she had no way of imagining.
She saw Canada as a great acre of snow surrounded by small ponds,
a new world, which would exist like a fairy-tale tame
and wild at the same moment.  She saw a man like a bear, and he would
hold her and keep her safe against the cold, and he would 
bring her water, cupped in his hands from the small ponds,
and she would drink.  She would never be hungry or thirsty again,
and the bear would rock her against the acre of cold.

© Heather Simeney MacLeod