Returning

A Poem

This piece explores ancestry — of place, and the power of place, to activate deep memory. It considers connections, formed perhaps by familial ancestors, distant in the past, yet somehow still carried within our bodies and awakened under just the right circumstances. My ancestors were seafarers, their lives timed by the tides and the catch. I was raised near the sea. I have also not visited the ocean in many years, until recently, and it stirred a deep longing and desire for it that had gone dormant, living in the mountains so long. It also stirred imagination — just how far back was my love for it seeded, and how many distant stories does that love hold?

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Take me to the place
Where I fly with the gulls
On their beach-stone wings

Float in waves of kelp
Wandering, over deep
And shallow, until

I rise
In sprays of salt
Greeting the slope
Of the shore,
Exhaling briny breath

Take me to the place
Where I gaze over the sea
With the eyes of all my
Grandmothers,
Who have come to see
Once more, this cradle
Of their lives

Voices carry, they speak
In the wind, and of it

A prayer to the sea,
And for it, for gifts,
For the lost,
And returning

Turning, turning
Toward a thousand voices
Welling within,
Calling
To the deep

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Strait of Juan deFuca, from Vancouver Island, BC. Photo by the author.

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