On Brazeau Creek
Grandpa visited once each year or so
when I was a boy.
His gifts were stories.
Picking him up at the train station would lead
to the story of his trip by train along
the flooding Mississippi
when he was eleven.
The water lapped over the tracks and
he could see those big old catfish
jumping from tie to tie…
Each visit we’d pack the car with food
and grizzled Aunts, and off we’d go
to Perry County where the homestead place
was reached.
He would wander with me in tow
and tell of the wild turkey released in the schoolroom or
of running traplines along Brazeau creek in winter
pulling drowned muskrats from the frigid waters,
his bare hands bright red, numbed beyond feeling.
By late afternoon we’d have made our way
across Highway ‘C” and up a wooded ridge
to his brother’s house for dinner.
At the table, as evening deepened, he’d
tell the story of his great-grandfather’s leaving
Saxony behind at age forty, a Seelitz
stonemason called by faith to farming.
Emigrating with a hundred or so other families
to Missouri’s wilds to shape to their dreams:
barns, homes, fields, schools and churches
where their words are still spoken.
Some years ago the homestead house fell
into its cellar. Now, as I wander,
all over his land the ruins whisper
and shift with ancient prayers.
What remains are weathered stones:
foundation chimney root cellar and
scattered fence posts.
(This poem is dedicated to Apollo Marcel Lewis, my grandson born on July 2, 2017,the newest member of the 8th generation of Kuehnerts to live in the U.S.)
