Author’s Note

I have been struggling with my lack of cultural identity for a long time. Growing up in the United States, I was told it was a “melting pot,” but it never felt that way. Instead, it seemed like people were forced to abandon their heritage in order to fit into an identity that doesn’t exist. When I ask what “American culture” is, the answers I hear are hamburgers, hot dogs, the 4th of July, and the military. None of that feels like culture to me—only consumerism and violence.

I envy those who have songs, dances, rituals, languages, and stories passed down through generations. I don’t want to take anyone else’s story. I only want to feel the presence of my own. But too often I feel like a ghost wandering through borrowed traditions, searching for a home that doesn’t exist.

This poem is my confession of that ache.

— Rowan Evans

Invocation

Come closer, reader—
into the hollow where heritage should dwell.
Hear the echo of silence,
the yearning for roots that never took hold.
Witness the ache of a soul
adrift in a country that mistook conquest for culture,
violence for pride.
Step gently—
this confession is not just grief,
but a longing for home that has no name.

Inheritance of Nothing
Poetry by Rowan Evans

I envy the ones
whose blood carries stories—
whose tongues remember
what their ancestors sang
in the shadow of temples,
at the mouth of rivers.

I watch their rituals unfold,
candles passed from hand to hand,
dances older than empires,
words carved in a language
I will never taste.
And I ache—
not because they have it,
but because I don’t.

What was left to me?
Fast food wrapped in plastic,
holidays gutted of holiness,
flags worshipped instead of gods.
I was taught to pledge allegiance
to violence,
to wars I never wanted,
to victories built on graves.

My culture is gunfire.
My anthem is grief.
My inheritance—
silence where a song should be.

I drift between borrowed myths,
a pilgrim without a shrine,
longing for a history
that does not dissolve into slogans,
or rot under the weight
of conquest and forgetting.

I do not want to steal another’s story.
I only want to touch my own—
to feel it burn in my chest,
to know the names of my dead
and what they carried for me.

Instead, I stand at the threshold,
watching others feast at a table
laden with memory and meaning,
while I starve on scraps
of hamburgers and hot dogs—
a parody of belonging.

Tell me,
how do I rise from soil
that has no roots?
How do I call myself home
when my home was built
on erasure?

Benediction

May those who carry deep roots
cherish them with reverence.
May those who wander rootless
know they are not alone in the ache.
And may we who inherit silence
still find ways to sing—
to build new rituals
from longing,
to craft belonging
from the ruins.

If you would like to check out more of my work, you can find it here… The Library of Ashes