An Elegy for Ancestry & Earth

By Eneida Giboyeaux

I remember how strawberries always held an inherent connection to my grandmother, cradling a small red heart in the palm of my hands, the fruits of her labor. She poured blood into the earth, sowed its eventual reward for the sake of her daughters and son, and their daughters and sons. We used to smile at each other from across an ocean with strawberry juice dripping from our lips, celebrating the beauty of blood and matria, how her veins ran deep within the earth, how memories of our ancient mothers pulsed within a single fruit, how it tasted so new to us, and so known. 

The earth yields dust now. My grandmother’s bones are ashes. My mother lied down beneath a sycamore and died when the leaves did. Their memories mingle with the dirt and no matter how I claw at the broken roots, I cannot find them among this mass grave of dead earth. Ancestry has long been killed. The roots of trees have all been splintered into powder. It is not long now before their branches, carcasses of a hopeful past, collapse inward and bake into curled, blackened ghosts under an unchallenged sun. 

It is not long now before I lie down on hallowed earth and embrace the inevitable. This grave was always prophecy, a rite of passage every mother makes, even if motherhood lies dormant in the walls of your body: to die too young. We have died too young. And now I cannot anymore remember the dark, warm soil-womb I was born into but I know this earth is where our culture has lived and died, and it is where I must go now that this earth is dying too young. We are dying together. 

I wonder, if when she died, my mother at last recalled when the world was young, or if the memories of a green world died with my grandmother. I imagine the mountains were dipped in amethyst. That the oceans rolled onto glowing beaches in pulsing colors. That behind my grandmother’s house were bright jade-green hills freckled with petaled stars. That strawberries grew out of concrete. How beautiful she must have been, the hope of continued love, of more days and descendants, of blood destined for rebirth. 

For all we remember, I think we forget the inevitability of growth. The earth will reclaim her body one day—and the memory of how my mother would sprinkle salt on platanos, or the way my grandmother sang hymnos under her breath as she picked strawberries, will sprout anew in the emerald curves of a growing vine, or breathe again through the sunlight spilling over a rose petal. Life will never live long enough; there is always room to grow. 

I think one day a future will align itself with the gravity of our dead history. I think a new age of persisting women will rise from our ashen graves—and they will cradle our dust as the sky falls, and the rain will renew this old blood into clay bodies, and the cycle will begin again. 

The cycle will begin again. My distant daughters will remember the beauty of ancient ancestry, of culture, of songs and strawberries. They will remember, my distant daughters. And if they cannot, they will create. 

Eneida Giboyeaux is a junior majoring in Creative Writing and Publishing & Editing with a minor in Spanish from Harrisburg, PA. She enjoys singing in Spanish much more than speaking it and loves drawing wobbly pictures of drag- ons in her spare time.