Cold Whisperings Of Bones Poem by David Kowalczyk

Fifty years after your death,
whenever I ask my uncles about you,
they turn distant and gray.


Light flees from their eyes.
Their teeth fall from their mouths
and clatter upon the floor.
Your name stops the world.


You began to die the moment
you first set foot in America.
The minute you began to beg
for respect as a human being,
the hour the English language
turned your leonine mane into
a tangled sorrow of scraggly wires.


Your first month in America
was spent mute and numb.
Your speechless world became
a virus which spread throughout
the family tree.


The art of silence
is one the Kowalczyks
are born masgters of.
'Never speak unless
spoken to, ' is the family credo.


Kowalczyk translates into English
as 'son of the blacksmith.'
Its deeper meaning, in this bloodline,
is 'son of silent shame.'


Tales are still whispered about
how you were drowning in vodka
the month after my father,
your first child, was born.


This alcoholic oblivion returned
twelve years later when my father
hoppen on a bicycle and pedaled off
to shovel coal on the Erie-Lackawanna railroad.


This descent into hell's bowels
supposedly ended only after you
came within a whisper of choking
to death on your own vomit.


Or so it is sometimes told.
Whenever people ever talk
about you, a contradictory story
always surces within a week.


The gossip lingers.
Your wife became so homesick
for the hills of silesia, so repulsed
by the groveling worm you had become,
that she refused to ever kiss you again.
Yet, three more field hands
sprang from her groin.


The rumors persist.
One star-crossed Christmas Eve,
you stole firewood from a gypsy.
After learning of this, he cast a spell
which left you trembling for the
rest of your life.


Your muscles gradually atrophied,
and you spent your final days
unable to wash or feed yourself.


The fact that your death was answered
a mere nine hours later by my birth
is more the irony.


We are the same soul,
spit immediately back to earth
to atone for the sins of a lifetime.


The most virulent, vile, ugly sins
of all. The sins of omission.
That which we have failed to do...


How many ways, on how many levels,
I died the day you were born,
Grandfather.