When My Brother Speaks For Hours, There’s Something He Wants Me To Remember

You recall oceans of the past clear as glass,
know the movements of constellations of long gone souls.

You connect me to the time before I came to be
and each time we speak for hours across an ocean,

I spool your words winding them on something like a pick-up
reel to replay until your memories augment my own.

Two decades senior, you’re my encyclopedia to the generation
I never met and even to our mother—her days before me.

I see her past through your eyes. We work it out together
fitting puzzle pieces of grown folks lives into place,

hoping for enough fragments to make a picture of what life
was on the island where almost everyone was like every one else

and the divisions we now feel through race were only divisions
of class, education, this church from that church,

the churched from the unchurched—
all the unnecessary ways we find to divide ourselves.

Ellen June Wright was born in England and currently lives in New Jersey. She has consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week in June 2021, and recently received five 2021 Pushcart Prize nominations.