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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4176 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Seal Island Treezaa (T. E. Ballard) I have lived in the land of my father where the seals swim like newborn babies in black skin, the green hair of the rocks dance over their bodies and they sing to me. For ten dollars a bag I was paid to pick the locks from these stones, dry their bodies in the sun, carry the kelp back to the docks, have my skill weighed. My great grandmother did the same with the men who washed upon shore. She placed pennies in their eyes wrote their names on a lighthouse wall. I have traced my own beneath the Richards and the Johns, dragged their imagined bones to old men who remember my father as a boy . It is this weight that I hold now even though I have grown and moved to a place where there is no sea and the tall silver trees hold it back. Yet, even here there is the low cry of the dead swimming somewhere. |
