There he lies, beside his brothers,
splayed on beds of gravel, rockweed,
boulders, sand,
and a great new hole is torn
in the bank above,
of shifting, friable, glacial moraine.
Through three-score years of questing,
I have looked to trees for strength,
above all
this particular glorious line
of fathers, pagans, spirits,
whose green and noble heads
sway with tales of death and birth.
He’s fallen, yet will live.
For high tides lap
his bits of limb and leaf,
skin and heart,
into the forever sea─
I wish he could have walked,
and I be rooted.
Grey Sparrow Journal 