ANCESTRAL Far up and off behind my mother’s voice, my mother's mother's voice, like a lark call above the dark meadows of sleep, a high up pure and sudden annunciation, a strain she'd carried all along and me caught in the song, slipping off to other voices, my father's, father's, father's work in the fields over Hartshead, my mother's, father's father fighting from village to village and the body of my father's brother rolling in the channel tides. Each life a traveler not yet really arrived, like passing strangers, the lanterns half cloaked, showing a glimmer at the doors of the living, half looking for shelter, half wanting to stumble on beyond us to what waits, some place perhaps in the brimming dark where the story ends. -from River Flow: New & Selected Poems - Revised Edition
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I just read about the passing of someone I knew just a little bit. I would see him and his wife at various places or out when walking but never got to “ know” them.
It made me think, I really don’t know why, but we don’t “ know” people really until we hear some of their stories. It takes time to know someone but then again we can have that chance encounter that affects us profoundly for the rest of our lives.
I do “ know” that belonging to a caring community is vital. This person had such a community of friends and will be so missed by them. We are the product of so many, many encounters. Somehow your poem ( that I read just after hearing the news of this person’s passing ) made me reflect on what has shaped me. The people in our lives…all the past lives, biologically and socially, all our relationships… all our relations.
( I recognise the location in the photograph! Have gazed many a day from there )
Before committing to this Buddhist path I would often wonder about my ancestors. Others who looked like me, had similar gestures, who perhaps had thought fixations like mine. With the growing understanding of interconnectedness and rebirth, this curiosity has grown to encompass all humanity...before, to come, in this time. I especially love this bit in the poem:
me caught
in the song,
slipping
off to other voices,