Heritage
— Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve
At a Glance
- • A poem on what a daughter inherits from her mother’s line — worry, illness, thin hair — and the weary mitochondria that carry the inheritance into the body’s failing extremities.
- • Author: Olivera Andonoska
- • Form: Free verse, long-lined stanzas ending in a vertical “LOUD ECHO”
- • Collection: We Are Eve
- • Theme: Inherited illness and the mitochondrial line
- • Epigraph: Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve
From my mother I inherited:
worry for All and sundry
(even when there was nothing to worry about)
illness and thin hair
passed down from her grandmother
and all of us bear the inheritance of one of Eve's seven daughters.
Our mitochondria are weary
failing to spark
the most distant cells of our bodies,
so our legs grow heavy,
our feet starved and rough,
aching from fatigue.
The tips of our fingers, long ago
became dull growths on our palms,
they no longer ache;
pain grows elsewhere,
spent from the force of our embraces.
The crown of our head is wrapped in clouds,
our thoughts are white fog
s c a t t e r e d across t h e s k y
we cannot gather them,
they no longer belong to us.
Our bodily home
has lost its ceiling, its roof,
it leaks
all
our
contents
into a LOUD ECHO.
About Olivera Andonoska
Olivera Andonoska (b. 1980, Prilep, North Macedonia) is a philologist and proofreader specializing in the Macedonian language. She is the author of the poetry collection We Are Eva, which received the Antevo Pero Award in 2025, and the short story collection How I Killed Vera and How She Was Reborn. She has also published children’s books. Her poetry and prose have appeared in literary magazines, and she has participated in literary festivals. In addition to her own writing, Andonoska works as an editor on a range of publications.
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