The White Mans Burden

Lost in the forest,

I broke off a dark twigand lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemeddeep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,a shout muffled by huge autumns,by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprigsang under my tongue, its drifting fragranceclimbed up through my conscious mindas if suddenly the roots I had left behindcried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood—-and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent