~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Francis Dylan Waguespack

Inheritance (a communal will from the last dry-born)

We leave you scraps salvaged at Mémère’s feet, little fingers grasping at a lost lingua franca,

and in that timeless game of broken telephone, their legacies became your legends.

We leave you our shunning of the hurricanes, our refusal of their given names,

how outsiders give themselves away, saying Katrina without flinching.

We leave you the tongue that learned to split in thirds—French at the altar, English at the bank,

Kréyòl in the kitchen, silence in court. To be sure, you’ll need them all.

We leave you mouth harp songs not written down—the ones you hum but don’t know why,

         hambone rhythms holding time, those front porch open-window blues.

We leave you each other, the bitter cousins and borrowed aunties, play-kin, god-kin, friends

made in the grocery line. Never forget you are never alone, and leave no one behind.

We leave you the family bible wrapped in oilcloth—missing Genesis, intact in Lamentations.

Take the hammer. Take the hymn. Take the hand reaching out in the darkness.

Take the memory of solid ground—

not to return to it,

but to remember what it cost to leave our footprints underwater.

Francis Dylan Waguespack is an activist, painter, and writer from New Orleans who writes poetry about Louisiana, the politics of disasters, and being from a place and in a body that both live under threat. He is a teaching artist and maintains a studio practice in Chicago.