Jane Biegun

Reparation

A poem, in my eyes, is a public document of experience
—meant to be shared …an invitation to think hard
about the human condition …. —Tim Seibles, PoemoftheWeek.com, October 5, 2007

I want to apologize for my mother’s Uncle Henry whom I overheard say “black plague” back in the mid-50s when I was nine or ten, escaping from Chicago heat to stay for the summer with Aunt Bern and him in their rural Wisconsin town, population still under 200. I thought he meant sickness, that plague that killed so many in Europe I read about in my textbook. Then a decade later his meaning came clear. So finally, here in this fast, spiraling new century … to George, Trayvon, Breonna, Sandra, Martin, always Martin, and every other soul whose name should be overheard by children everywhere, I grievously apologize for Uncle Henry’s violence—he the tall, skinny, gruff, white-haired farmer who held my small hand when I was four on special walks to the general store for vanilla cones, who ate runny eggs every morning and poured new honey on soft fresh bread, donned clean overalls for Sunday service and taught me how to crack hickory nuts on the anvil—he whose toothless grin and gentle twinkle I think I had loved.