I have written poems about my grandfathers
and the lives I was told they led,
having met none of them, but I knew
I was appropriating their stories, claiming
them as my legacy although all I was doing
was adopting them, as their children had
adopted me, none of the stories truly mine,
and I only family by the thinnest of ties
that frayed with the passage of time
and the accrual of those linked by blood
bearing a shared DNA I could never claim.
So now, many years on, I write this
about the grandparents truly mine,
helically bound to me, their headstones
tucked into a wooded hill overlooking
the Kanawha River that carries my tears
and regrets into the ever patient Ohio River.