DNA connects me to centuries
of selkies, kelpies and banshees
answering for the wrongs done
to or by those who knew
the stories of their past
with an intimacy we
don’t imagine today.
I’ve never believed in ghosts,
but I wonder if I hear
sometimes something beneath,
like a low steady beat
pulsing through this land
goading the growing madness,
unwilling to let us just
move on from wrongs
we fight to forget.
We have the wrongs.
God do we have the wrongs,
with no admitted story binding
our angry and hurt and
self-serving, God
the self-serving,
to the genesis of this
unbroken mournful beat.
What could it be
but the deep steady throb
of those drummers displaced
and those stolen from
our self-evident truths
drowned under these lights and noise
obscuring, burning the pages
that point to the precise moment
when all this disorienting
maddening fear
awoke.
We hear it
and know it
and clamor to cover it over
with an older tune conducted
by Cain himself titled
I’m No One’s Keeper.
The low sad circling beat
reminding, crying, begging
for progeny to hear and
to scream
I know why!
Unaccompanied,
the low beat goes on.
The madness
goes on.