Mellifluous grasses that house the strummers
with legs of music, regeneration, of leap; bug songstresses
and drumming elk – how came you here?
Were you grown from in the soil?

My ancestors traveled by ship in hard-soled moccasins,
in wool, in malnutrition and whooping cough and woundedness,
in mothers who held daughters they wept for,
in sons’ eager loins, in prideful fathers
we grew.

Crickets with your little cellos,
meandering deer with your cut feet,
bear at the river’s edge, eagle high up there, sycomore,
when we die, how long will it be
until we are ancestors;

will anything grow in us?