“Armillary Ancestry”

Celestial clockwork spiraling in its own rhythm and time

Kicking up its wake of intersecting orbits

Life cradled in the arms of ancestral paths

radiating through time and space,

In me.

Ancestral homelands span the weathered rocks of towering Torriden Hills

Flanked by rushing depths of The Minch and the mighty North Seas’ Morey Firth,

Their chilled appendages reaching inland,

Toward scenes of Viking raids

battles fought and invaders turned away,

back into the bitter flows of icy currents,

swirling to and fro in the sheltered firths of Beauly, Dornoch and CROM-arty.

Salty waters of the North Atlantic,

softly sluice rough-hewn borders,

bounding the birthing grounds of the mighty clan Munro,

Knocking rhythmically against ancient crest of eagle perching.

Shrieking a fearsome call to arms that echoes down the eras.

Loyal Protestants. veterans of the Thirty-Year War,

Accorded the right to wear honored Black Watch Tartan,

Yet still--Earldom lies disbanded.

But blood, bleeding through, stands strong.

Descendants spew forth across distant reaches of our hallowed orb,

Streaming onwards in pursuit of opportunity, unwilling to be denied.

Work-roughened hands, farm, forage, and forge on,

Feet beating out Scottish rhythms and imprinting new trails on far-flung shores.

memories fade of Foulis Castle, its well-loved tartan and traditions

obscured by wide-open Texas skies and churning dust of Oklahoma prairies.

Each individual in their own time and place, pushes onwards--towards Me;

Each on a singular path, revolving around a central pivot;

Each carried forward, crossing oceans, plains, peaks and valleys

Uniting,

Unfathomably,

In Me.

Histories, lives, aspirations,

twine together.

Stories left untold, Roots unknown.

Unless…

Restless sons or daughter seeking home, navigating—carefully,

extracts them from slippery sands, disturbing their hidden places

amid the murky depths of frigid ocean crossings and lives

carved in bas relief, reaching out, ‘cross the ravages of time.

Creeping out of crumbling stone.

Partial pieces, fractured glimpses, truth

woven of myth and fable, drawing nearer

Circling. Spiraling. Gravitating.

Towards heart’s center,

In Me.

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