Primitive, Uneducated Heathens

A prayer to the ancestors for grace and wisdom in hard times

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

Ancestors, I call out to you. 
I need you now but I don’t know how to ask. 
Long have I walked closed off to your presence 
learning to think of you as dead and gone,
grist for the mills of forgotten times. 

Primitive, uneducated heathens we called you
Compared to our powerful science;
to the apex of our calculations and measurements.
Fodder to the march of our progress
that carries us haltingly towards that glorious day
when we will all be free of toil and suffering.

How could we have forgotten the power of your songs?
“Too late to turn back now” they said
Holding their slide rules as they split 
the earth’s first atom cleanly in two.

Still, somewhere in my heart lives a tiny fragment 
of that time when mystery held the land
when we walked in the footsteps of giants.
Oh how I feel its sting in my side as I reach
for… what’s wanting
in this late hour of empire becoming. 

You have my back, I know you do
but I want to welcome your hands again
onto my shoulders
as I walk headlong into the unknown of these times.
I want to feel you there with me in my choices 
gently guiding the fingers of my will with your hard earned grace as 
the earth turns in such peril beneath the hasty undoing 
of her vibrant web of dreams.

Dare I stand coldly by as her body burns
burying my grief in plans and numbers?
Or do I choose to open my heart wide
and learn from the losing?

Please help me now to be the medicine I came here to be. 
May we stand between worlds together
and tend this vulnerable birth. 
May the music of your love fill my ears 
with the audacious dream of a living earth
free from the shackles of disconnection and emotional poverty
connected to the source of true mother, fully manifest 
as a living expression of love.