Jennifer Beckett lives with her husband and daughter in Georgetown, Kentucky.  She graduated from Georgetown College and earned the M.A. at the University of Kentucky.  She has taught English and French for 14 years.  She has been published in The Heartland Review and Accents Publishing’s Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems. 

 

Lineage

 

The best legacy is
the language I’ve inherited

with its knotted branches
and breaking twigs.

I’ve climbed this language bleeding, barefoot,
trying with one full-body stretch
to reach centuries back or forward.

I’ve salivated at its fruit
and fallen, scraped-handed.

Hoping to land in satin leaves
I’ve crashed onto grounds ungiving,
feeling the life blood
of begats now re-born.

The words host get-togethers;
each year a few invitations
catch a breeze and flutter into gutters.

But those who arrive celebrate,
devolving into syllable-slinging shindig.

At some reunion,
I’ll push in a stroller
of my own little linguist-revolutionaries.

I can already feel them kick.

 

 

 

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