She began with two lovers
on the swept floor of earth.

She was what passed between them.

She was a gourd too heavy for the vine
and full of her own wet seed.

Her grandmother kept the red bag
that held her stem
so she would not forget
the other women she lived inside
before this ruined time.

The beginning of hunger
was in that bag
with bones and the origins of betrayal,
but there was the forgiving thing,
the dry seeds of the rattle
that could shake healing to a start.

She stood naked
and painted herself
in the old way,
a red hand
across her face.
She danced in the ceremony
of fire
that rose to the stars.
She wrapped night's black skin
around her shoulders
and disappeared inside its dance.

She is the one that lives now
in the hand of the river
that wants to flow away from itself
but never does,
and at night she falls
beneath the water
where once I woke wearing her painted skin.
The red hand of it was on me.
I knew I was water
and heard her say,
Above is the betrayed world
where our children are the children of strangers
along the lost road
in the land where barns are red
because they are painted with the blood and milk
of mothers
of what they hold.

The closed bundles of healing
are beginning to open.

The first stem is growing like a vine.

It holds the cure
where you can reach through time
and find the bare earth
within your living hand.

I say her name.
It is earth calling land,
Mother.

It is glacier calling ice,
My daughter, my sister.

It is ocean
calling the river,
Water.

© Linda Hogan, Book of Medicines 1993

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