Ancestral Breathing

I dropped the berry in a stream  

    And caught a little silver trout.

                                             “The Song of the Wandering Aengus”,   WB Yeats

When I was twenty five

had lost my breast

and almost my life,

I awoke to

ancestral voices calling:

Shma, listen

inside your body

for the song we brought out of Egypt

opened the sea with

wove into our spines,

rescued from burning houses, kept

alive in exile,  breathed you into life with

flooding your cells

with our grief, our ancient fears -

don’t make a sound or they will find you

crouched in a barn in Narodtich,

under the table in a Warsaw attic,

on the bottom bunk in Buchenwald.

 

Sitting cross legged between my pituitary and pineal

the grandmother of many names

Shaddai, Malchut, Bubbe

breathing deep from her round belly

offered tea and crackers

gently teaching me

how to open and close each door

without the whole house crumbling:

be a restorer of harps, a note in a symphony

learn to adjust the part to the whole so that effort

does not have to rise like hot lava.

 

Shaa she said, running

her fingers over the creases between my eyes.

The poem is already there

have a soft spine.

there it is   that

a silver trout

swimming.