Ancestral Streams: Poetry Collection
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A Few Words from My Ancestors
Look over your shoulder
And we’ll be there
With the song of the cicadas
And unbound hair
Your next steps
Are our journey
Beyond the fens
Past chapeled chrysalides
To quilted Highlands
Steeped in the heart-den
Where we dance
With each beat of the drum
And the sorghum of joys
Warm as a hearthstone
Intrepid as the pipes
Sails from your lungs
And with the ancients, rise
Oak Folk
Today, we are journeying
But not too far
The stars don't need us
The planets are content alone
The Aspen invites us home
Today,
I want to be the coin
In the fountain
The Cornish hen
In the nest
A sanctuary for leaves
The three shades of Twilight-
Nemetona at rest-
And I need nothing more
Than the passage of words
Before bed
And to be tucked in
Like a babe in the barrow
An apostrophe on a pallet
Of swan feathers
Like a therian hunter on the wall
And the corona of ochre
Wreathed around your smile
Homelands
(Visiting the Graves of Ancestors)
The morning air
Leaks over the
Window sill
Calling me
To hover
Over the mounds
With a bouquet
Of Heather
And Bog Myrtle
My feet
Turn over
The same soil
The rain
From your
River
Flows downhill
The bones
That built the dust
In my constellation
Of lives
Rest well
Any time
I float near
The needlepoint
Quilt of Your Memory
Damnonii
Painted people
Bodies in Hills
Meet the stars
We tattoo
In the deep
Goddess belly
The Midnight Cave
Where the ink
Ticks the clock
From woad to indigo
Lichens and
Caledonian forests
Roam our flesh
Seanchaidh tales
Become enmeshed
Pinewood trinities
Carefully sewn
Rooted bloodstream
Gently flows
Highlands, bygones,
Threads of peat,
Weave the
Ancient tapestry
And they follow
Overseas
As the echo
In my head
No words said
But the sounds
Of Epidiian hoofbeats
Carry on
In the waves
Of footsteps
The plate of cornbread
And tattered tartan
Scraps of the language
I stitched back into
My daily dialect
And I'll always
Try to go back
But sometimes
The world turns
And I'm
A potted plant
But from my raised bed
I'll grow a thistle
Just for you
And remember
Laying
Head-to-head
On my last trip
To the little glen
Where the sky
Soaked the earth
And I sank
Down, down, down,
Deep in the dirt
And our Earth
Wefted 6 feet
Into a tight-knit Den
And I imagined
That the reeded Fen
Etched in my arm
Bridged the gap
And whenever
I look north
The same sun
Makes me glad
To shine above You
And keep
The homelands warm
For just a few seconds longer
Than you ever could have guessed.