after Sagamore Hill
You come here as a child with a group
of some kind, a school, scouts,
your forever teenage parents
and all your cares fly out the lace curtain
windows at the front entrance seeped
into the history of San Juan hill
and the cutting of Timothy
for an honest day’s pay
and the wild flowers in the lower field
on the 85 acres and animals taken
on Safari from their lives in Africa,
transformed by his own hands into rugs
and wall hangings, a skill learned in childhood,
whereas yours were rug hooking
and making macrame bracelets
that you learned at camp where you met
other girls your age from Baldwin who
you might have gone to school with
with whom you remained pen pals your whole
life, on Facebook messenger now, but still.
Endlessly reading the same books
you see here on his shelf at the museum
but not in their original place, distilled. Do we
always see ourselves and our own history
everywhere and in everything or can we see
the universal without even knowing,
bits of wreckage and newspaper headlines
that meant something to the world at one time
and whose family produced great leaders
in the way some would learn to fish or farm,
generations of skill lost to time and war
and economic trends? My father’s Reader’s
Digest set of Classics for the Everyman,
Plutarch and Aeschylus, Herodotus and
Upton Sinclair, my Uncle’s paperback Plato
from Nassau Community College sit
in my humble room alongside my own
scribbles, echoing here this once great man
who Uncled our beloved Eleanor, who
wasn’t a great mother it was said, too
valuable to even speak of her in less
than hushed tones. Teddy had been
called to power by an anarchist bullet
that sent him to the seat of power
instead of the study of law fit
for a gentleman that he had planned,
always the fear of the other forming bonds
to be broken, cohesion melting into family
squabbles from tragedy to triumph
and back and forth and around and through
and once and for all, finally done.

Kelly J. Powell is a poet native to Long Island and a graduate of SUNY Binghamton’s Creative Writing Program in 1988. She has performed widely on Long Island and NYC. She has a new book of poems called Posthumously Yours from local gems press available on Amazon.