We Ancestors

A few minutes go, my Irish grandmother,
Brigid Elizabeth Gibbons,
admired my baby, and now
she’s away and he is forty-eight.
An hour or so it’s been,
since I watched my Italian nonna,
Maria Angelina Caterina,
stir polenta with a wooden spoon.
How can sixty years have passed?

Ancestors have made the way for me
even as I make a path
for descendants who make the future.
Grandmothers who went ahead
now come present, touchable.
There is a way being made,
a spiral road, intricate with epochs
that pass by again at intervals,
and in waving distance.
Nonna! Che piacere vederti!
Elizabeth, is the wind still at your back?

In the elegant curve of space-time,
we forebears make the way,
greeting so-called past and future.
Without even leaving
the present’s widened reach,
we travel between the times
like particles taking every path
in the no-edge multiverse.
There are ways being made!
Wormholes, geodesics,
intersecting roads that link us all
in more dimensions than we know.
Grandmothers who went ahead,
come touchable and present!

©Susa Silvermarie 2018