Legacy

I have spent seventy years trying to persuade you,
to manipulate you with the poems I’ve written,
to remember my people as if they’d been yours—
to flesh out in evocative detail my parents,
my grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts—
knowing that one day I’ll be gone, and without me
to remember them, the poems I’ve written
will have to go it alone. I owe my people
so much, and I want them to enjoy—if not
immortality—a few more good years in the light,
my grandfather patching a tire for a quarter,
his brother weaving a rag rug on his sun porch,
my mother at her humming sewing machine,
my father un-thumping a bolt of brocade,
measuring for new draperies. Perhaps they were
for you, to draw open and see on your lawn
Cousin Eunice Morarend playing her accordion.

Copyright © 2024 by Ted Kooser. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 13, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Were you to visit the new farm machinery display at a county fair in rural America, it’s possible that you might see what I have seen: a farmer missing a hand or an arm, assessing the same kind of grain augers that once tried to kill him.”
—Ted Kooser