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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23.3 (2002) 147



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This Could Have Been Called "I am hopeful that her father will be present for her testimony" but the Title Is "Message from My Daughter"

Catron Grieves


While talking with you about love and rain
and Iowa, and how it is to be a mother sometimes,
and how hard it is to be so far from my land,
My daughter left a message.
She is driving to Oklahoma City tonight.
Geoff is with her, and for now she loves him.
Geoff and a Sears card and her old rusted out Chevy
still trusted in the night, the deep
sky over the prairie and the black road.

You know poems start like this sometimes
unexpectedly, and with a sort of haphazard longing
or sense of unrecordable loss. This could be a poem,
or a road map. I think of all this, and my lost control
of the illusion that, as her mother, I had some latent ability
to make that past better—that already, you're probably sleeping.

I am feeling like someone I used to know a long time ago,
and my daughter is traveling somewhere else
forced to swear to facts that someone's son had a gun,
and that she was just driving an old red pickup truck,
after a party, it was summer, August on a red dirt back road
and that he was in a Blue car, just any old blue car
and two boys she didn't know were shot,
her father had killed a rabid cow one summer, like that
a single bullet to the head,
a fact that will bring her closer to one more death.
Did I tell you that I dreamed last night
a strange metaphor for this distance from her life
there was a movie playing and I couldn't get tickets
then, I got in anyway, but there was no place to sit.



 

Catron Grieves is a Cherokee Indian from Tahlequah and a poet. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Piecework: A Magazine of Poetry by Women, The Iowa Review, Reinventing the Enemy's Language, Real Things, Moonrising, A Terrible Foe This Bear, and Aniyunwiya/Real Human Beings, an anthology of contemporary Cherokee prose. She is currently researching and writing about the identity formation and transformation of American Indians who are part black and African Americans who are descendents of American Indians.

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