What We Carried
We were two sisters
hefting pails of brook water,
trucking them back to camp,
both of us barefoot,
water swelling over the pail’s rim,
me fighting for an even keel
or all’s lost, one side heavier,
dare I say my sister’s side
since she was shorter
and gravity being gravity,
the pail tilted her way
water sloshing her feet.
How many other things
had she carried, that I,
at the time, hadn’t a clue?
Her eyes, sorrow eyes,
spare as sand blown bird tracks.
Not once did she confide
how our drunken father
plied her legs apart, how
she cried long into the night.
Months later, reading her diary
after she left, I divorced Father,
abandoned home, and did
what any reasonable daughter
would do. I chronicled our childhood,
told how he forced my mouth shut,
warning, “Don’t say anything.”
*
Dianna MacKinnon Henning taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several California Arts Council grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program and has run The Thompson Peak Writers’ Workshop in Lassen County. Publications, in part: Poet News, Sacramento; Worth More Standing, Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees; Voices; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Artemis Journal, 2021 & 2022, 2023; The Adirondack Review; Memoir Magazine; The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester; Pacific Poetry and New American Writing. 2021 Nomination by The Adirondack Review for a Pushcart Prize. MFA in Writing ’89, Vermont College.
Powerful poem–thank you. I love how carrying water works as an objective correlative for the emotional weight you and sister struggled to carry.