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Old Women, you were the lattice
for new growing vines, used to tell
how fires were kindled, blazed,
how the years turned and seasons
swelled with new growth
Dark eyes nearly hidden
you kept the secrets. Waited.
Planned when to fish, plant,
harvest the tall grain. You
instructed girls in the mysteries
of blood and sex,
birth, children. You held the
moon
on a silken thread, tugged it
around Earth so cycles interwove
with songs you sang by dark-night
while the moon slept, the sky lit
with thousands of stone fires.
You chanted our histories,
how we moved
across land and streambed to come here,
and when we moved from here, as spring
heated the land, this too would you
braid
into the story, spinning it out
in thick plaits
Now, old women don't tell us
what is carried in their wisdoms.
They live silent,
separate from the rest of us
and the long call of the owl is far
c. 1993
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