We’re home again… and I went looking for a poem for today…  was going to write one, but found a poem in the journal from 1990… a poem which is appropriate for today... especially after a weekend with the family in Louisiana... I am grateful for all my sisters and brothers...

SISTER PAT

Strange to be in my sister’s home

whom I haven’t seen much 

in thirty five years of living away

from the family we once were

before I got married and then she did

and we went off to make families of our own.

She was once a little girl I remember

with long hair and a nice smile

and she recited the Christmas story from St. Luke

at church when she was ten

and I listened and didn’t know

she would grow up to live in Virginia

in a Virginia house and send a husband

off to work every day on the bus and subway.

Now she is a woman almost fifty 

with hair that is still long

and a nice smile and ideas about politics

that I can’t agree with or even appreciate,

but that doesn’t matter

because it’s clear she’s my sister.

We were conceived and grew in the same womb.

We are alive in the same world.

We will be laid to rest someday in the same earth

on which another generation will have passed.

Saturday, March 20, 1990