This is my 11th offering for the NPM 2023 Nonce Forms Scavenger Hunt. The Silver Shovel by Monty Vern is a variation on the Golden Shovel where you take a line or lines from an existing poem and credit the original poet and poem. The Silver Shovel uses each KEY word as an end word skipping words like a/an/and/the/or etc. that are not essential to the meaning of the line. You must keep the end words in order. The new poem does not have to have the same subject as the poem the line(s) were derived from. The bonus is to use a poem from a WP poet – I selected Sarah David’s (Words and Coffee blog) poem “Work in Progress”.
Who do I call family
The people at work
Or forget them for progress
The ancestors from a severed tree
Those broken and burnt branches
With a delicate tenuous arching
How does this tree grow
Winding and vining with forks
I perch and attempt to choose
A green leafy and fruitful limb
But it is an unknown
All knowledge beyond my reach
Ancient histories intersecting
We wandered verdant valleys
Alone and lost strangers relying
On gifts and kindness gentle
Care received from foreign hands
From people unconcerned with histories
I mourn for my father’s
Lost pride discarded on the journey
Precious reminders a tapestry
Woven of women’s sacred mysteries
Passed down now lost a mother’s
Origin and love stories
These were in my very DNA secreted
A tangled reminiscence of galleries
Where hang the past and present life’s
Questions teased with answers
That the modern nomad finds unneeded
Having surrendered everything for love
This tree transplanted in new dirt
Grew slowly years out of time
Watered with a hope for revealed truth
Thinking good fruit would follow
But we are a lost rootless family
No matter how hard we work
Pasts are forgotten in the name of progress
My mother was very much the genealogist and traced her family back to the 1500s. My father’s side proved much more troublesome. My father had family in Europe and in Asia (Russia) that between the Russian Pogroms and the Holocaust were lost. The family tree supposedly had both Roma and Jew. Neither group fared well. My Grandmother Ernestine (Tena) was a German Jew and my Grandfather Sidney was a Russian Jew. Their grandparents had the foresight to come to America. Other than knowing that my father’s paternal side were tailors and his maternal side consisted of grocers and common laborers, there isn’t much other information. The Ancestry 23andMe DNA test only confirms what we had suspected. When they came to the US they assimilated and the 2nd generation rejected their past – language, customs, and dress. They moved from NY to Chicago. So I am a melting pot – a true blending of everything that makes America unique and yet I wish I knew more about those people missing from the official transcript of my family tree…