Legacy

You know the photo: the one of

the young woman with a scarf &

dark hair, crouching over what

used to be a student



screaming why



hands plunging into the low atmosphere

as if she can grab her god’s shoulders &

shake him for letting this happen.

But you don’t know the man in plaid



over her left shoulder. You don’t know

his class had been dismissed early to

participate in democracy. He is too far

away & indistinct for you to see the



thick glasses, the mustache he still

wears fifty years later. You don’t know

that a decade after the National Guard

almost shot him, too, he would become



my father. Daffodils remain silent, but

not complicit: they’re still suffering shock.

Flowers planted in gun barrels, tear gas

tossed back at uniforms. Shoots



of yellow flowers from my baptism

poke through early May soil.