Before we came who were you? A young bride who embraced abandon and how your bodies could sing together.

A farm your life before the new.

Before you grew us who were we? 

Imagined or fortuitously written, small hands and bodies, in the cloth of our ancestors? In the ink of guarantees. 

The people who came to leave there, they started tomorrows here. 

That’s really all we all are — an imperfect line, a collective beating heart, people who want more, lives beginning or ending, good or bad.

Our spirits threaded through all time.

Souls making noise, pounding on doors, holding hands, making bread, sitting on beaches, planting trees, men who drove machines, the becoming of widows. 

We are the communion of living until we are not. 

But we brush by others, we join small things to our hips, and larger things to our flesh and in our hearts.

She launched us forward like a sailboat in the dawn. 

The small complicated boats that we are.

Oceans and storms and places we would survive, with sand and soil we’d dig our hands and feet into so hard. 

Words we’d slay. Passion we’d create. Pain we’d know. 

We are the experiments too.

The bold humans who say yes or no and try to build small stone paths or large bridges that connect masses of ground. 

We are the love story started years ago when no one knew what their dreams or struggles would bring around. 

We are the collective bodies, all of us, who are folded into the planetary urns or graves or diaries someone may open or read decades or hundreds of years later. Our starts imagined.