The Place of Forgetting

The Place of Forgetting

Name me what you wish,

healer, crone, wise one,

elder, shaman, recluse, druid,

sorcerer, charmer, witch,

it matters not.

My body carries chant, incant, enchant.

Orpheus taught me poetry and song

communication and communion

far beyond mortal being.

Animate and inanimate all respond.

Call it what you will,

root cellar, cupboard, pantry,

they store apples, walnuts, parsnips,

bulbs of garlic, root of burdock,

blackberry, ginseng, sassafras,

seeds of mugwort, milk thistle, mustard.

Bundles of sage, yellow root,

yarrow, devil’s claw and dandelion

hang from hand-hewn rafters,

gathered when the moon and signs were right.

For all of these you will return

when black wings spread.

I have been here always.

Watched as you lost the language

of tree, grass, soil, animal,

insect, sea and wind.  Still my

left hand holds fast to sacred space.

October carries the last leaf down,

earth embraces, blesses

that which you do not.

I place the elementals

and your ignorance

into the oubliette of time and wait.

New poem (first draft)

Singing From The Earth

This is the last place my mother

asks me to take her.

She is ninety years of age.

We pass through the water logged field,

the tall grass pasture and climb

the rutted pathway up.

Here is the country cemetery – few gravestones,

only flat standing rocks,

etched by long gone hands.

Here is the grave of her mother,

beside her father

and next to their youngest child.

Mother tells me she always wanted

to place a lamb monument here,

to remember the little sister she

does not remember.  The one she

could have mentored – could have led to Christ

the way her Sister Merle did for her.

Merle died young in childbirth

is buried somewhere in a California

grave my mother will never see.

This is the last stop on the cemetery circuit today

her last call with sisters, brothers, family,

a lifetime of memories singing from the earth.

One more edit of this poem (now I'll let it rest for some time).

Mountain Progeny

I am from the aprons of Sevilla, Rosella, Perdella.

From suited men twirling pocket chains

While their children churned earth.

From farmers like Robert, Jess, Isaac.

Sunup to sundown laboring the narrow hollows

And steep hillsides of Appalachia

From the dirt scrape of a woman

Who walked out of her poverty

Into the thick books of possibility.

From the lanky boy who, at fourteen

When his father died, hired himself out,

Fifteen cents a day, all to his mother.

I am from dusty corn cribs,

From crawfish and ancient stone axes

Hiding in the streams of August water.

From I incantations of lamentations

sown by bloody heels into

the furrows of summer afternoons.

From my Grandmother’s snuff tin,

From tattered hymnals

And 22’s filled with buckshot.

From the scratch of chickens,

the taste of fresh raw milk,

delicate home-canned peaches in December.

I am from pockets full of purple hearts

Where bronze stars, deep in the cedar chest,

Guard the nightmares of midnight.