by Felicia Mitchell
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
William Wordsworth
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s star.
“Go back where you came from,” he said,
and I looked at the ground beneath my feet.
I did not think he meant South Carolina.
“Here?” I wondered. “Does he mean here?”
I emerged from this earth like a buzzard rock,
and my cells are stardust and oceans and light.
It is not time for me to go back where I came from.
I want to live long enough to vote one more time.
“Go back where you came from,” he said,
and I logged onto the Internet like a college student.
“Who am I? Where am I from?” I asked.
“My Ancestral DNA Analysis,” it said, and I clicked.
A sage observed it is incorrect to claim one land as home
when we are as diverse as all the words Rumi spoke.
And let us not forget our Neanderthal and Denisovan kin.
“Go back where you came from,” he said,
meaning anywhere but here, this ground, Virginia.
But where could I go if I got exiled for speaking out?
Deciding would be like choosing between two children
or cutting off my nose to spite my face.
England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Sweden,
Senegambia, the Congo, Southeast Asia, East Africa, Spain —
maybe these places need me, but so does this country
my many ancestors fought over, against each other,
one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all
(the one torn from the arms of some of my ancestors
who are so hallowed I do not deserve to speak their name).
“Go back where you came from,” he said.
“How do I get back there from here?” I asked.
Spreading myself that thin would be genetically impossible,
as complicated as decolonization or the color of skin.
I am here and only here and only me and never anybody else,
my soul my life’s star rising between sleep and forgetting
as I navigate in a body as frighteningly white as white
in a nation where anybody who does not look like me
is as vulnerable as some of my ancestors were, and then some
Felicia Mitchell, a native of South Carolina, has made her home in the mountains of Southwest Virginia since 1987. She recently retired from Emory & Henry College, where she taught English and creative writing. Felicia’s poems exploring identity, family, and the natural world have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. “Waltzing with Horses,” a book of poems, was published by Press 53.
