A Gift of the Ancestors

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”    – Georgia O’Keefe

I am in the late summer of my life.

I have more days behind me than before me.

I find myself thinking

Of my mother, my grandmother

What were they doing at my age?

They were becoming grandmothers.

And yet even as I await the arrival

of my fourth grandchild, there grows inside of me

an urgency, a longing wanting to push

out into this world, to be birthed,

To take its first breath, infuse life

into its body proclaiming

Here I Am!

Not a human this time but

an idea, a thought, an image

a vision child

Within me lie the accumulated

visions of generations upon generations

of women who carry our family genes

How do I honor them?

I put pen to paper

I pick up the camera

I tend to crops to feed us all

as my grandchildren bear witness.

All I bring forth they eagerly consume

as I did when I was their age

at the feet of my mother.

I am a repository of all the wisdom

of all the generations as far back

as when we were star-dust upon the flowers

I offer this to you my children

In this twilight time

may the seeds I plant today

be the food for your children’s children’s children.

 

Blessed Be…..