Thinking About My Ancestors
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 America. Takopachuk: 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.