Where was my family from?
Russia and Poland, mostly
by way of England and Austria,
within nervous stop at Ellis Island
just before the great war
changed everything for all time.
Actually not. Not mostly Poland
or Russia, the war not a change
of anything really, at most
a precursor of a greater war.
You, too, questioner, may be dead now
speaking from a plot in a cemetery
outside Akron. And I would now tell you
I am from Lithuania and England,
Scotland and Ireland by way
of a lie carefully told, that I
could only unravel once you,
dear questioner, no longer cared.