With lightning skies above an open field,

Do you lie down in loam or hide beneath

The ash tree planted on the tumulus mound?

Do you take comfort in the soil of life

Or in the grafted branches fed with death?

I risk the tree, to hang in Odin’s wake

And face the fulminations of the wronged—

Of those I buried with Time’s eager spade

To wall them off from memory, to free

The limbs to hold another, while entombed

The dead await this rise to punish me.

So now, with lightning skies above, I let them.