Mother Swamp (A Point in Time collection)

I watch the sky, night after night. Sometimes, I think I see my grandmother, and all the mothers before her, traveling the shatter of stars across the darkness, swimming along that great river of light. In the day, I squint against the sun beyond the swamp’s wide-reaching branches, beyond the clouds. I trace messages in the tops of the trees as they twist and shake and nod. I put my ear to their trunks and hear them, after many days of rain, singing as they pull water up, up, to their great green crowns. Sometimes, when there are storms, they break and scatter branches over the mouth of my burrow, my home, the cave that First Mother dug out of hard river clay.

“Bend,” my mother told me.

“Look low,” her mother told her.

“Keep down,” Sixth Mother told her.

“Smother the fire,” Fifth Mother said.

“Hand over the smoke pipe,” Fourth Mother whispered.

“Hide,” said mother to daughters, through the years. “Hide.”

My neck pulls, my jaw tightens the girdle of my head, but I have spent my life looking up. The stars’ current glitters. I roll my shoulders straight, tighten my pack on my back. Follow the mothers’ trail across the miles. Nine generations have hidden here in this swamp. Nine generations have walked these paths across bayous, across rivers, across forests to meet our future.