Poem In Which The Past Envies The Present by Joanna Grant
This piece was originally published at The Bluebird Review

By Joanna Grant
Once I read in a book of myth
how some primitive tribes
blessed a new home with a burial
under the threshold, or beneath
the floor of the great room
where the clan would while
away their years, the little
whitening bones their totem,
their surety, their hostage to fortune.
I read of this in my book of myth
and thought to myself of the old house
with its stains, its ratty old carpets,
and my own small self sitting
silent on the crumbling stoop,
and I think yes, I was that child,
that hostage. My blameless former self.

Joanna Grant holds a Ph.D. in British and American literature, specializing in fictional as well as nonfiction travel narratives of the Middle East. She spent eight years in that region, notably two years in Afghanistan, teaching writing, mythology, and public speaking classes to American soldiers and gathering materials for her own memoir, which she is currently completing as part of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University under the direction of Mark Sundeen. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in journals including Guernica and Prairie Schooner.