Family

My master/father sent me up from South

Carolina to Boston as a nine-year-old.

My mother's illiterate silence has been a death.

I wonder if she still labors in his fields.

His sister, dutiful but cold as snow,

gave me a little room in her house, below

the stairs with the Irish servants, who hated me

for the fatal flaw in my genealogy.

For the first time in my life I am at home

in this bevy of scholars, my first family.

Here, the wallpapers welcome me into every room,

and the mirrors see me, not my pedigree.

My sisters, Jerusha, Emilia, Elizabeth ...

But Mama's unlettered silence is a death.

Source: Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011 (Louisiana State University Press, 2012)