You Ask Me About America’s Future

I remember this –
I was a child clutching the string of a green balloon
Shivering next to classmates
On a blustery day in March
Our shaky cursive messages on strings

We set our balloons free
Watching them ride wildly through the air
Our necks craned backwards
As green faded into blue
Hoping someone would find our words

I remember this –
We could grow a garden in the spring
The summer lasted just one season
The rains came in fall – the snow came in winter
There were no hurricanes in western Carolina

I remember this –
We used to look each other in the eyes
And read each other’s faces
We used to talk to strangers – on the bus – on the street
We used to read books printed on paper

You ask me about America’s future
But I want to tell you a story
About the time I knit a sweater
From the yarn that I found
In a basket from your grandmother.

Heather Bruce Satrom teaches English to Speakers of Other Languages at Montgomery College. Her oral history project, “History in the Making: Documenting Stories of Immigrant and Refugee Students,” won the American Association of Community Colleges’ Faculty Innovation Award in 2024. A believer in the healing power of storytelling, Heather writes poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in WWPH Writes, Maryland Literary Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, and in the anthology America’s Future: Poetry & Prose in Response to Tomorrow.

Image: Ninara from Helsinki, Finland, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons