Homage To The Ancestors Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Many wombs opened before my coming;
In Catholic Normandy, flat Flanders,
The past turns in its coils,
Blood of my tribe, spent rubies in its eyes.
Dutch, French and Spanish,
Pounded into the gritty bread of Scots.

I was an old man's child,
Singer of songs, as all his village knew,
Who made the short walk to the grass
In a warm winter,
Grief and joy like sword-cuts on his brow.

One brother sleeps by the maple,
Another fills the bellies of Inca worms.

My mother, a withered gourd
Came late to the birth-bed;
Her christening present to me was a thorn.

Many wombs opened before my coming,
Quiet doors in the spirit house on the moor.
Grandmother's ghost is weaving a wooden cradle
So she may nurse my bones.