Reading Heaney’s “Dig” used to make me jealous.
The man found a cultural heritage,
a personal narrative,
locked in years of dark, loamy soil.
I often wished to do the same.
To take the black, thick dirt,
sweating nutrients, and squeeze it like a sponge,
the history of my family dripping
between the cracks of my fingers.

Instead I’ve been given snippets of conversation
with which I have sewn the patchwork outline
of my family’s past.
There’s a cloth scrap, tough and course,
for a Cherokee woman,
given a Hispanic name, so that
no one would question the color of her skin.
There’s a piece for the boy
who left Virginia for Nazi-occupied France,
feeling more comfortable among the dead and dying
than at “home” in the mountains.
There’s even a space, an opening, for
the grandfather who died before I knew him, leaving only the gap
between my two front teeth that I had “corrected” with braces.

One night, at dinner, I asked my mother
where she had come from.
She told me of her own mother
whose parents were not fit to raise their
four children, and a “family history”
of mental illness that ran so deep
I sometimes swear I feel it myself.

That night, more than anything,
I hated Heaney.
Watching my mother speak,
on the verge of tears, I wished that
the old Irish bastard
had just let things stay buried.