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oracle-of-nonsense — Elegy for Ancestral Ways
Published: 2012-10-10 23:36:43 +0000 UTC; Views: 362; Favourites: 3; Downloads: 3
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Description
The instruments of my ancestorsplayed the music of battle –
the wailing of the Great Highland pipes
weakening would-be Roman conquerors;
the bodhrán’s menacing rhythms
summoning the shade of still-fierce warrior
Cúchulain and the Crone, the Mother, and the Maiden,
sisters three of the Morríghan goddess-head
to frighten foreign enemies
on dark-spirited nights.
These were the war horns
of the blue woad-painted Celts
and the cattle-raiding Gaels,
these the rhythm keepers
of the sword dancers
and the Dál Riata oarsmen.
Now they only keep the time
for my toes tapping softly
on the scuffed floors of buses
to Scots Wha Hae
and Follow Me Up To Carlow.
Pa tells me his stories,
the histories of lost ancestral countrymen:
when the Highland Scots
came to North Carolina mountains
and Cape Fear rivers,
they still had the massacre
at Culloden in their eyes,
the still-bleeding memories
of their futile rebellion,
the defeat gritting like sand
in their teeth.
They were tired of sword dances.
The instruments of war
had been played to death,
and after generations of fighting
for kin and clan and honor,
who would blame them
if they transformed the skirl of pipes
and the ominous pounding of the bodhrán
into the mountain music my Pa played
in Washington state dancehalls across the 1950s,
charming the pretty girls
with fingers that flew across banjo strings
in an unacknowledged echo of a reel.
