Returning Along the Ridge

I walked the ridgelines where old homesteads stood,

remains of houses half-hidden in wild growth, and in vine,

I felt something beyond my solitude

move through the air, through breath, through memory,

a voice returning, low as the mountains themselves.

✧˖.☘︎ ݁˖

Nothing here feels lost.

It rests beneath the fern-thick ground,

where worn paths dissolve into the hush of the hills,

yet presence returns in the turning of the land,

in each hollow bearing a name not mine to claim.

✧˖.☘︎ ݁˖

These mountains, keepers of years beyond reckoning,

how many fires once lived upon their slopes,

long before my kind gave names in ignorance,

called this living country empty, wild.

Here stood a Nation’s home,

summer gardens rising soft beside the valley’s edge,

before the long unmaking,

before the people were driven westward in fragments,

yet erased entirely, only carried elsewhere, waiting.

✧˖.☘︎ ݁˖

Still, something returns.

Sorrow gives way to care,

a knowing in the land itself,

as if the earth remembers its own burden,

its long returning toward what has been called home.

✧˖.☘︎ ݁˖

I have seen it in the elder by the spring,

in the steady rhythm of remembered loss,

in words that carry whole valleys within them,

Beloved, Unaka, Chota,

sounds shaped from history, from memory, returning each time they are spoken.

✧˖.☘︎ ݁˖

Return comes with change.

What rises again appears altered,

like water that has passed unseen beneath the hill,

bearing all it has gathered,

yet finding again a former course.

✧˖.☘︎ ݁˖

I stand here, on ground given only in part,

listening for a voice beneath my own,

seeking neither to mend what cannot be mended

nor to deny what remains,

witnessing what was nearly silenced, still present.

✧˖.☘︎ ݁˖

Nothing is ever fully erased.

The land keeps account in ways beyond our keeping.

These mountains hold their people beyond sight,

beyond the reach of names, remaining always within return.

✧˖.☘︎ ݁˖

Let me remain in that reckoning,

whatever it asks,

listening to what the ridges carry forward

into light.