This Way to the Neolithic Village

by Ingrid Leonard

My childhood veins are flecked with flint,
hop-skipping channels into homes open
to sky that once circled a roaring fire,
or curled in a chair with Kali and Brockan.  
Summers, I pound the tarmac path
past a deep ditch, flush with forget-me-nots
and grouse to the Stones. Time falls away
in these horizons – the curve of the land warms
the blood in my arches, sounds a burr through
the seabed. My feet are wedded to Orcadian
rock, slipping over each other like the boats
that brought us to Skara in our younger skins,
shed in a sloughing of words and wave-drift
till we played houses in the cradle of our bearing.