Eric Ashford | + Follow Poet |
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Woodland Mysteries

There you go,
back, far back into the woods once more.
I wish you knew the names of all these tree.
They are distant aunts, and old soldiers,
warriors of coincidental conflicts.
Blood soaked relations of relative ghosts
seen now only as points of departure
where tombs have been riven by lightning
or whole forests burnt to the ground
to a more fertile ash.

Names unknown but named in a book
rivers and reeds write 
for later roots to unravel.

Fathers as old as the first horse.
Mothers who breast fed the slow dreams
of a humankind destined to plant her flag
upon a million fields of creation.
Yet more await, are nursed as new seeds
that glimmer in a shinning nebular.

Now I watch one lone child 
pass through gorse, thickets, and briar, 
travelling through its own forest
to be born into a family
that has yet to be named or branched.

Life lives and returns to find out why
again and again.
Reincarnated crucifixions
dot a new landscape each era,
vacations in Ohio last until
death stamps a later passport.
Sweat and blood in Thailand,
transforms into poetry.
A blind man digging his way through a city
mining for a treasure he was born with.

Back we will come
arriving from anywhere
and anyone.
Each deliverance a blessing
we had to uncover and acknowledge
as our own woodland mystery.
A place between sacred mountains and molehills
where the trees have yet to be labeled
or cutdown, and green growing offspring
with their little axes
getting duller and heavier each year
until the woods and all disappear
to follow the night-train
to where they will arrive at, 
whatever platform we have
cobbled together or erected with prescient hands.

Then we claim our Kingdoms,
our many mansions, the many branches of us all.
As the cycle turn and spiral
again to return carrying a new child 
as a gift of the light.

Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2021

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