your left hip
crinkled and worn
like the hip I inherited:
a topographical ache
as if a cartographer penned our DNA
to match in rhythms of hurt.
Your mother was hunted down
across Siberian fields;
through serendipity,
luck,
she made it safely
through a war that stole her family’s land.
You were born of her,
displaced in an army camp,
the hot dirt of the Middle East so unlike
the rich soil of Białowieża forest,
your mother’s childhood.
The dry air made you sick:
fevers and rashes abounding despite
prayers for a different tomorrow.
You were carried over oceans,
your mother still caught
in a war she did not start:
both of you abandoned, when it was over,
in the rain-glazed English countryside,
outsiders to those thatched cottage villages,
instead corralled into barracks
breeding resentment and need,
gossip and hunger.
You watched free nations rejoice in their win,
unwilling to acknowledge
the tectonic shift of the land
beneath your ancestry slip,
slipping, slipped, tear
tearing, torn away
from your feet.
This broken legacy
you passed on to me:
displacement is ingrained
in my bones.
I rub my lower back
my left hip
crinkled and worn
like the hip I inherited
a topographical ache
as if a cartographer penned our DNA
to match in rhythms of hurt.
