The Wicker Tome

The tales told by the dead are not the stories the living tell their children.

The dead speak tales of time and memory

Those passed are still here, the memory of their footprints ever in the soil.

Carbon converted to tree root and river.

From whence we come, so shall we return they say.

They say it and I can’t help but think when I look

And see the hollow trees weeping the song of nightingales at dusk

The dewy field screaming the thousand voices of the crickets in the pines

That I have been here before.

Ones heart has a language.

It is fluent in its own tongue

Mine is of the hollows and the riverbeds

The crawdad and the hummingbird.

It doesn’t understand the gilded pages of desert sages

But it understands the desert itself.

The language of rocks and creeks, honeysuckle and willows

Those songs my heart comprehends.

My savior is prey and predator in harmony.

I am an acolyte of the ancient.

Resurrection in a falling leaf,

Salvation in a sea breeze.

The tales told by the dead are in the language of nature.

They speak of life.