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Beware the Lambs |
In Scotland, I hiked through a sterile forest
Along the Highlands, going west, frozen
Misplaced of time, me, an unfound mortal object
Stopping in a dead village of crumbling stone
A village emptied, souls forced to factories years before
Hungry ghosts gathered with me, unfurled, gone missing –
Back to that field of home in a forecast
thick with age, the storm of forgetting
and the forgotten trial of wet, sticking truth
Along the incoherent path, a crude sign
old dripping paint
Beware the Lambs that stopped me cold
Everything in my heart died, my brain
And so much died in that instant with the lambs
I stopped to touch the stones and walk among them
I felt the disturbance, the force that took them
I can’t remember the name of the forgotten village
or what they did, or how they dressed, I guessed
they drank tea that day, tea laced with
oh what was that?
The tea of the forgotten, the forgetting
the forgot
Vague childhoods, small rooms of darkness
The cool, quiet self-directed happiness of lambs
Catalogs of unknown facts and blurry faces
children with wood, women at a fire, men
with the flock, walking meadow after meadow—
sudden shivering intense history of holiness
There, in the primeval Highlands, I came across
An empty stone barn in that bitter gale
Inside, a skinned sheep with head hung from
The high rafter and I felt at home, so at home
It scared me, sent me out into the sleet
Thinking the barn is what, that sheep is me
copyright 2016
Viola
Weinberg |
