Once there were women who read books in trees.
I’ve heard it from their own lips,
these stories. And I was one of them.
I lay back in the Y-branch of a dogwood tree,
sun in the green leaves, a rain of petals
on the grass beneath me.
Once women washed in the watershed rainfall
of streams that tumbled down mountain
and into the plains below.
I knew a woman who dug herself a well, another
who raised rabbits, killed them clean,
skinned them as I might slip off a winter coat.
Once there were women who worked fields
in the hot sun and afterwards,
their work done, roamed the edges
where field met forest, where at sundown
the deer roused after dozing for hours
in the chicory and Queen Anne’s lace.
I know one woman who spoke her poems aloud,
standing at the edge of a field of tall grasses
so that the rabbits and the mice
and the red-tailed hawks could hear words on the wind.
She tells how lightning took down an oak
the way she’d take a lover.
Once there were women who fed themselves on roots,
who knew herbs and mushrooms,
simples and cures.
These days, if anyone thinks of these women at all,
it’s to dismiss them as primitive,
or pagan, or savage. . .
but I know how they held their bodies as they walked
their just once on this earth; how they wept
how they laughed; how they loved.
Once there were women who read books in trees,
and their minds and their bodies
were as pliant as salmon in a stream,
strong as the wolf tree maple at the edge of the field.
They belonged neither to fairy tale
nor myth. I knew them years ago.
They were my grandmothers. Praise them.