Two Years

A poem about family

This autumn I finally was able to travel north to where my father and brother live in Michigan’s upper peninsula for a visit. For two years a neck injury had kept me from traveling anywhere that required an overnight stay or a particularly long drive. We stayed in a rental house just a few doors down from my brother’s home in the small historic mining town in which they live. Seeing my nieces and nephews again after such a long absence was exactly as soul-restoring as you would imagine it to be, and this poem is a reflection on the opening of that experience.

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Two Years

I want to tell you, but it becomes 
too immediately ordinary, those 
simple houses built for mining
families in their clean and kempt 
rows between which I walked, down
the alley, cracked, well-trodden,
and wet with rain, toward the house 
where, for two ill and injured years 
I had not entered or breathed or, simply,
been—and, now, there it was, the yard 
all tilled up, a garden, framed in trees 
the blazoning colors of autumn. I want
you to feel it the way it came to me—
before I ever saw them, their laughter
a joyful thing beyond music, braids
and ponytails and bare feet, the absolute
energy, my nieces, all ebullience,
skipping their way to greet me.

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