Thinking About My Ancestors

Fredrick Zydek

 

 

I am sitting at my computer, suddenly

aware that every ancestor who contributed

to my particular collection of DNA is

watching the screen through and as me.

 

I’m not just talking about great grandparents

or ties I have to the old country.  I’m talking

about people who had names but no written

language in which to spell them, people

 

who walked the planet searching for food

long before our species invented the bow

and arrow or spear, people who lived on

fruits, nuts, insects and lizards and some

 

of the leaves that grew on the family tree.

I’m talking about what we were before we

were primates, before the things we now

call mammal slipped from their lizardy

 

past, grew fur and started nursing their

young.  I’m talking about things that lived

in the sea, fish that grew legs and curiosity,

mollusks and other shelled things that wanted

 

to move from place to place, one-celled things

that found ways to cling to one another until

they found ways to live as a community so intent

on being who they were – they became a species.

 

   


Fredrick Zydek taught creative writing and theology, first at UNO and later at the College of Saint Mary.  After about 15 years of the process, he woke up one morning and realized he’d rather go fishing.  He bought a small farm in Nebraska and raises soybeans and corn to supplement his writing income these days.  He has published seven poetry colections.  Ending the Fast included a quartet titled “Songs from the Quinault Valley” which won the Sarah Foley O’Loughlen Award by the editors of AmericaTakopachuk: The Buckley Poems is forthcoming from Winthrup Press and a new chapbook, Hooked on Fish, is forthcoming this fall from The Holmes House Chapbook Series.  He has been the editor for Lone Willow Press for about 10 years.

 

 

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