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Patricia Ranzoni
Valley
We follow the old paths, flicking off flies.
We've learned to live with stakes, but we know fear and time to go.
We drink deep, source dripping from our soft mouths. We don't know what is ahead we only know the arrow is set to the bow. We keep our eyes open through mist to the memory of light off leaves and heads high we listen for sign through the sad sayings of water and stone we know where we belong.
We fold ourselves down, grandmothers side by side in cloud-haired sun, remembering.
We tremble with the ground from trucks speeding by, letting our lids close off what has been ours to know and dream back and forth. We dream old dreams new and you dream me back my dream laughing and splashing, young here, brother and sisters rafting this small bloodsucker surf, then grown, then with my own. Our sheep and cattle invited to graze through the years to keep it from growing in. You dream me back my dream of wild berries, game, milk, apples, greens, how that land held and fed and sang us how it streams every cell-of-us still MOTHER! The water-drained ground of each rapt-eyed mother laboring her lamb or calf glistening into the world, licking it to life to stand and just know where to find what it needs what is any warm milk but a drink of place? Until I dream you back your telling of the last day of Roland the Cherokee and dream you I see what it is like to sling a poem at a dam and the mountainous sorrows of mountain people being Removed again in trails of tears and we dream back and forth the drowning of the Little Tennessee Valley and your dream of Roland in silence listening to the water flooding forever ancient birth and burial grounds dream of warrior Roland shedding his clothes in winter weeds your dream of Roland circling the boulder of the sacred fire pit the Old Ones said still burned deep in the earth, circling the rock with rope, your dream of Roland muscling seven knots about his naked waist tight...tighter...bracing his back to the granite and the water higher....higher his spirit aimed and his elder up a towering ledge oak keeping watch for it arcing into the sky the Old One climbing down to take the message, as promised, to the people. "Begin again." We dream what comes of such wrong and I dream you I know it's a small grief
to lose a small deer run even if the hay where we have been all this time is bedding I've called beautiful and you dream me back no lost homeland is small but of earth's whole grief the One Creaturebeat and we dream this together in the mystery of shared insight that is the only comfort for becoming rememberers and dream each other that in the same way our spirits know they are of The One we know this little pasture and its brook and the waters raining and welling and breaking into it are all of The One What Is and its One Water so will return to us some other way in time for the next ones drawn and we rise above it.
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