Our Forefamilies

Would we get along with our ancestors?
Do you wonder if they’d even like us?
We claim that we all come from them but then we expect they’ll take the blame.

My great-great-grandfather was paid to go all the way from England to Australia.
Likewise, my grandfather got a dividend to leave the clan or be deemed a failure.

Our forefamilies could not possibly know what to make of us and our ongoing lives.
How should all those generations behind us understand, let alone hope to know us?

Would they want to be associated with who we guess we are in our messy ways?
Do they approve? Yes / No / How can we tell? / and All of the Above apply
equally in reply.

All that we have found out about them are fragmentary traces of fully finished lives.
If we were ever to meet them, hypothetically, would we recognise them for real,
after all?

Do we love them for who we assume they were?
If we spent time together, what might happen?
It’s more likely to be antipathy and disapproval
as they and we begin to disbelieve we are related.

Whatever they anticipated, it was never us.
We must acknowledge their tut-tutting dismay,
based on evidently solemn faces in dusty old albums,
at what all their diaspora of descendants is doing.

Remember, our forefamilies started all this
yet they never lived on to find out the results.
They can condemn and disown us for being amiss
from the traits they bestowed, including their faults.

For all this speculation we still have no way to know.
Yet we are forefamilies too to our unborn sequel show.

Can we just get along by agreeing we are each a part apart?
Different ages not on the same pages,
indeed in however many volumes,
still being rewritten….