Poem/a/day: Origins

Origins

-Melissa Dey Hasbrook

On a sunny day, thick with alfalfa,
after hiking pastures of the old family farm,
I visit Billy Crego,
in his youth a hired hand on Grandpa’s bale wagon
alongside Mom when she was a kid.
Billy lives atop the Mason esker,
which ascends the Looking Glass River
into his backyard.
But that comes later in the story.

I am on a quest:
to see the Old German Bible
Billy described at Grandma’s funeral.
She died on the Fourth of July.
Yet the Bible is nowhere to be found
and he recalls giving it to a church historian.

We stand before his house
facing West Clark Road,
and Billy reminisces
before disturbances of
Indian burial grounds
there
waving his hand southeast.

I thank Billy and his wife Carolyn
for their hospitality and head for home.
But something strikes beneath the car,
a big rock in a line of rocks
that I failed to see upon departure.
Billy offers to drive as my car is towed.
We pass the land
last worked by Grandpa’s hands,
a ghost of a dairy farm
with milk-house remains.

Funny how the Mason esker
starts in Billy’s backyard,
bounds southeast,
sidling Lansing’s east side
where Grandma resided
after selling the remnant
of the old family farm.
But I realize this later in the story.

We chat as we ride
and I mention the Mason esker,
a glacial river become landform,
a phenomenon I recently unearthed
while writing about the land my family farmed.
And much to my surprise,
Billy knows what I’m talking about.
University students paid a visit to the Cregos
to see where the Mason esker begins.

Here the story unfolds.
Maybe my quest has nothing to do with that Bible,
still unseen in years that follow.
Maybe the quest is the esker.

Melissa Dey-Hasbrook is a Lansing area poet who organizes poetry events in conjunction with social causes. The writing organization, HerStories Project, which she founded is sponsoring a fundraiser and awareness event Thursday focused on sexual assault and survivors.

The event, Light in the Dark: Words of Life, Love & Loss is 7 p.m., April 21 at the Mid-Michigan Family Theatre in Frandor and is a fund raiser (suggested $10) for the Listening Ear Crisis Intervention Center which is opening a new Capital Area Sexual Assault Response Center.

At the event Hasbrook, a spoken word artist and poet, will read poems from her second book, “Circle Home” joining local poet and Delta College Professor Chey Davis and Claire Vallotton, an MSU professor making her literary debut. For more information on these events check here.

The poem is from her forthcoming book “Circle . . . Home”, which will be printed by the Women’s Center of Greater Lansing and is made possible in part by a grant from the Arts Council of Greater Lansing.