By Marlene Ekola Gerberick

I don’t think I’ve ever understood;

no, it’s stronger than that.

I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven you

for coming here.

For leaving places

with names like Evijärvi

and Töyrsä

places where umlauts bounce

with the playfulness

of the midnight sun.

For going away forever

from birch defined land

on the shore of the Gulf of Bothnia

and then never, never

stopping the longing for that land

left behind

so that none of us could forget

and become simply what we are;

inhabitants of a new land.

And, as I think of it,

if I hold anger toward the four of you

is little in comparison

to what I feel for your children,

my parents.

who named us Marlene Lucille

and Colleen Grace and Helen Elizabeth

instead of Marja Liisa, Sigrid Aino

or Taava Miina;

who kept our mother tongue

hidden away in a dark closet

brought out only for visiting elderly aunts;

who insisted that this tongue

was for the dead and dying.

And, as if to confirm,

took us to church

to be harangued in Finnish from the ceiling

high pulpit

by elongated, bony ministers who

never stopped

while I grew ever more restive

chewed the back of the pew like a beaver,

counted floorboards

counted steps to the altar

hoped with all my might

that the minister would choke.

Yet with all their new country ways

your children, my parents, always

spoke the word Finland

as if they had said God.

They told your stories, with embellishments,

in retelling, the stories

became rainbow legends,

the basis of a new myth system

where all the deities lived

on the other side of a wide ocean

And I, a child of even wider and deeper

imagination lived there with my gods

instead of here

So that all my life

I have longed for the home

I’ve never seen,

sung myself to sleep with melodies

I’ve never heard,

warded off evil with incantations

spoken in a mother tongue

which I cannot even understand