Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan

Drum

Inside the dark human waters

of our mothers,

inside the blue drum of skin

that beat the slow song of our tribes

we knew the drifts of continents

and moving tides.

We are the people who left water

to enter a dry world.

We have survived soldiers and drought,

survived hunger

and living

inside the unmapped terrain

of loneliness.

That is why we have thirst.

It is why

when we love

we remember our lives in water,

that other lives fall through us

like fish swimming in an endless sea,

that we are walking another way

than time,

to new life, backward

to deliver ourselves to rain and river,

this water

that will become other water

this blood that will become other blood

and is the oldest place

the deepest world

the skin of water

that knows the drum before the hand meets it.

Linda Hogan