Listen
There is a place I go
from time to time,
when sleep slips the world from me.
Perhaps you know it too
that sideways place,
just beneath the skin of things.
I find a way out through the basement,
past loose bricks, warped timber,
a gap just wide enough
to fall through.
Beneath this house lies another,
and beneath that, another still
a home older than memory,
older than counting,
older than breath.
There stands an Oak,
a mighty Oak,
Vast,
rooted in the bones of the world.
Its trunk rises through unmeasured time,
and in the dark of its roots
a light glows.
There, a voice waits.
It does not speak in words,
but in something ancient,
carried in the marrow.
Only my blood remembers the language.
It tells me truths we once knew:
about the order of things,
about the deep folly of men,
about the silence we have forgotten.
I ask questions,
child-like, hungry.
And the voice answers
with the patience of stone.
When the edge of dawn brushes the world,
I rise.
Up through the layers,
the dust,
the ruin,
the plastered-over dreams.
I emerge into the present,
where light is thin,
and noise is thick,
and everything feels
too far from meaning.
And I place my fingers to my lips,
And I whisper:
Shush now.
The ancestors speak in our bones.
They are trying to remind us.
They are trying to make us whole.
Listen
Listen
Listen…
