Ancestor

I touch this stone Barely legible My great great great great grandmother The face I’ve never seen Not even a picture, no photograph remains But here you lie Your bones beneath the ground So close, my journey so long To find you here This quiet field Hot summer’s day We spend a moment Not as brief as it would seem Enough perhaps to know You’ve been here all the while And I, in the return to this Sacred place Regain some lost part of myself The future a little less forbidding The same sky, the same sun, the same story Related All over again. (Previously published in Red Coral, Spring 2001)