I come from the dead, a long line of wombs.
Born between two graveyards, stretched like wings over our hill, rolling fields, church, the Angelus bell my brother rang every evening at six o’clock.
I come from crows, swallows, hazelnuts, woods, daily routine collecting eggs, pitted potatoes. Yearly cycles–saving hay, turf, picking apples in autumn. I grew in rhythm with cows, harrow, and plough.
I come from feeding lambs, calves, weekly burials behind our house, watched parishioners descend into death; boulders with circular heads, carved Celtic crosses noted their ending, my beginning.
I am from clay merged in grey landscape, sentinel spirits, walls, ancient epitaphs carved into crypts. Hours conversing with ghosts, stone language a circle, square, growing in contradiction, pagan and christian.
I come from promises, relics, foraged bone, ancestors in tombs. Latin letters on slabs sheeted my body,
this world, my safe place. I live in a land of plenty. I come from the land of the dead.