For Robin

Everyone has a place they didn't go.
I didn't go to Togo
With the Peace Corps
When I was just nineteen.
"Your life will always be different" my mother said,
"If you do this, and then come back,
You will be a different person."
But I didn't go.
I feared the change and missed the chance.
At fifty-nine I miss the person that I could have been.
Togo will always be my place,
My place I didn't go.

My mother dreamed of Russia.
She studied it, and read of it, and, sadly,
Spoke of it, of her dream place,
To far too many people.
In her youth Russia was exotic.
Tsars and Cossacks.
Fur hats and samovars of tea.
But as she grew it changed, and became a place of enemies,
A place McCarthy told us no real American would go.
She never went to Russia, but - her vision shared -
It blocked her life from other places, other dreams.

Lou. Lou wanted Alaska.
Wanted it because her man went there.
A pioneer, as her father had been a pioneer.
But Daddy wouldn't let her go,
Wouldn't let her take the risks and suffer the privations.
He kept her home, and safe, and smothered.
She, who would have braved the cold frontier,
Became smaller, shrunken, lonely as she swept the house
and shoveled snow and raised her sisters' children.

Robin never went to Dushanbe.
She never saw them weave Bakara rugs.
Or watched the Tajiks ride their ponies on the steppes.
She never saw the plains where Alexander passed,
In his long search for new worlds yet to conquer.
Dushan-bey, Bébé!

But our world is broader and more free
Than for our mothers and for theirs.
Someday you and I will rise from rocking chairs,
And pack our bags and haul along some boys and girls,
Grandsons and great-nieces and the neighbor boy,
To carry all the luggage, settle bills, and hail the taxis.
And take our flight to Africa and to Tajikistan.
"You can't go! It won't be safe!
You don't even speak the language!" they will say.
But we will smile and lead our little troop away.
We are not our foremothers,
But we stand on what they built within our souls.