ANCESTOR TONGUE

ANCESTOR TONGUE

—from Simon Ortiz's workshop

Conas tá tu. Mo anim Mairín

I am called Maureen, she of the sea,

Sometimes I am the Morrighan of the Battlefield

She who stood on the shoulders of CúChulainn

as he slumped tied to the Lía Fail

to the Stone of Destiny

as darkness descended

behind the corneas of his eyes.

She, who became the enemy

when he spurned her love—

she was steadfast in death.

I am not little Mary, the mother of God

as the Jesuits were wont to say.

To be the great three-fold goddess

the raven, forever associated with death

has me worried

because I was given the owl nametag

no raven, but still the same messenger.

Why it worries me is because of what follows.

Sometimes I dream of things no one should see

but the witness is an afterthought.

They say it's the Second Sight

a gift from my mother's family.

They say that in dreams begins responsibility.

but my mother's craziness chased me toward sanity

and I ran from that responsibility.

I'm supposed to be writing a poem

going deep inthe the verbness of am and is-be.

Instead, I'm skittering on the surface of fíos

of what I know, knowledge stacked like facts

cords of wood to hold us against the winter

instead of an airy dance of water skeeters on a glassy pond.

I'm skittering on the brink 

of imagination into the precipice.

I have been the standing stone,

the Oghan writing on its edge

the raven, and the washer at the ford.

We wre uncertain of where we stand

the boundaries of self and will,

the anarchy of culture.

Ta me go maith. I learned some Irish at the knee.

I am the broken vessel, the carrier of a dead language.

I had to change my mother tongue in school

because Irish syntax didn't fit the American way.

We were like Simon Ortiz's Aco-ma

where the preposition does the work of language

the harbinger of direction and time.

Our mind works mysteriously, circuitously

and it remembers in spite of ourselves.

What is hidden, the hidden places

we all write it into our selves

our own way of being guided by the ancestral tongue.

Naming is a language event

that moment when you're presented to the sun, an Grian.

We write it into our selves, in stone.

We may have lost our language

but we have not lost ourselves.

We have not lost ourselves.

We have not lost ourselves.

We have not lost ourselves.

Hoh.

Maureen Hurley 9/7/2007 

Warner Springs Ranch