Looking Back

Alan Berecka

March 1, 2026

I, who am the grandson of four immigrants—

two from Poland, two from Lithuania,

once sent a vial of spit and a hard-earned 

Benjamin to Ancestry.com to find out

that I am over 99% Polish and Lithuanian.

It seems before my grandparents

hightailed it to the States to escape

this or that, my people stayed put

since the day some ancestral fish

had climbed out of the Baltic Sea.

I pointed to these results as proof

that my grandparents had erred

in dooming subsequent generations

to an exile from belonging, that feeling

I had in a junior high class that American

History had nothing to do with me

until we got to World War II in which

my male kin had fought and bled in.

I asked my friend in Tartu, Tõnis Vilu, 

a talented poet and proud Estonian

whose people have stayed put for eons

what it felt like to know that he belongs.

He answered, “To be perfectly honest

I have never felt like I fit in.”

That’s when the scales fell for me, and I saw

that this longing to belong has nothing

to do with borders, but will always be about

being human, unless perhaps someday 

we regrow our gills and swim back home.

Alan Berecka resides with his wife Alice and an ornery rescue dog named Ophelia in Sinton, Texas  He retired in January from being a librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi and is settling into a whole new level of contentment. His poetry has appeared in such places as the American Literary Review, Texas Review, and The San Antonio Express. He has authored three chapbooks, and six full collections, the latest of which is Atlas Sighs from Turning Plow Press, 2024. A Living is not a Life: A Working Title (Black Spruce Press, Brooklyn, 2021) was a finalist in the Hoffer Awards. From 2017 to 2019 he served as the first poet laureate of Corpus Christi.