Jennifer Lentfer
Queens and Grandmothers
Born before the war, how could you imagine
a world where your children and grandchildren
are free to defy you?
Where nations revolt and families dissolve?
There's new fires to tend
as you sift through,
and try to build walls of ashes.
The rain will come,
take down bricks and empires.
Duty and obligation, you see,
when attached to extract & control
are flimsy.
You are not better, we promise, we burn.
We burn, and dance, and transform & cleanse
and do not look back
for your guidance
anymore.
“Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II, a contemporary of my grandparents, I began to think about how much change their generation had seen over the course of their lives. This poem was an attempt to assert my personhood and ever-evolving beliefs about right and wrong during a time when the political divide between myself and my grandmother is wide.” —Jennifer Lentfer
Jennifer Lentfer is a poet and collagist living in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.A. Her work is focused on rebuilding culture, as well as honoring lineage and community. Lentfer’s work wrestles with, and at the same time, preserves her ancestors' humanity, while constructing the world she wants to see emerge from reckoning with settler colonialism. Her poems have been published in The Guardian UK, Split this Rock, Lucky Jefferson, Yemassee Journal, Poached Hare, GRIFFEL, the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, and on her blog, how-matters.org. She was a poetry finalist in the New Millennium Writing Awards XLIX. An essay interrogating narratives of “America, the great” within her own German settler ancestry, entitled “A story of us,” appeared in EcoTheo Review. One of her poems became lyrics in a music composition commissioned for the official opening ceremony of the Peace Bridge in Derry~Londonderry, Ireland in 2011, but she didn’t feel like a poet until the following year, when her cousins asked her to write a piece about their grandpa’s hands to be read at his funeral.
