Patricia Koksal @ Edit Red Writing Community

Patricia Koksal

United States, LA, Baton Rouge
Username: thepoetspen

I am a child of an ancient ocean
Born in a seashell

I hear the heartbeat of the tide
Within me when I am still
And listen

Beneath the silent water
Hair streaming
Contemplatively I listen to my soul.

I was conceived on foreign soil of parents I never knew. In the lush jungles of Panama I came into my being, a child of ancient wisdom flowing in my blood. It would be years before I came to truly understand the majesty of the legacy, the legacy of the warrior princess.

When it became my time, my mother flew to the United States to deliver me. I became a citizen of the United States and of the world simultaneously at 8:04 a.m. on January 4, 1949. We stayed with my maternal grandmother in New Orleans until I was six weeks old and then returned to Panama. My father was a physician with the United Fruit Company completing an internship for his medical practice, he is Costa Rican; and I am the first generation in my country. I am proud of this distinction, carrying the blood of my ancestors forward to this new land, a gift I cherish. I have brothers and sisters, but they are not the first, posterity has reserved that seat for me. My mother was a child of New Orleans in the truest sense of the word. There is something about the place that invades the soul of true descendants and part of my genetic coding is structured to the French Quarter; over four centuries of building. I have traced her family back to the 1460’s and the Court of Louis XIV. The first time my father ever saw me his mother had dressed me in orange with a headband around my forehead in true child of the jungle fashion; and so began my mortal life and they called my name Patricia.

thepoetspen's Genres: Poetry, short fiction

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