An Inheritance

Five dollars, four dollars, three dollars, two,

One, and none, and what do we do?”

This is the worry that never got said

But ran so often in my mother's head

And showed so plain in my father's frown

That to us kids it drifted down.

It drifted down like soot, like snow,

In the dream-tossed Bronx, in the long ago.

I shook it off with a shake of the head.

I bounced my ball, I ate warm bread,

I skated down the steepest hill.

But I must have listened, against my will:

When the wind blows wrong, I can hear it today.

Then my mother's worry stops all play

And, as if in its rightful place,

My father's frown divides my face.

Credit

Copyright © 1994 by Naomi Replansky. “An Inheritance” originally appeared in The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (Another Chicago Press, 1994). Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Author

Naomi Replansky

Naomi Replansky was born in the Bronx on May 23, 1918. The daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, she began writing poems at a young age. By her mid-teens, she was publishing poems in literary journals and anthologies. Replansky studied history at Hunter College but did not finish her degree, opting instead to go to work. During the 1940s and 1950s, she worked in a factory in New York City and as a translator in Los Angeles. In the latter decade, she earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Date Published

01/19/2018