Lullaby for a boy buried 7,500 years ago
at L’Anse Amour, Labrador
“Lay his fragile flute, my dears,
Safely wrapped in woven scraps,
Near his fingers, stilled at last.
Fever’s gone and peace returns,
Innocence replaces pain,
Once again my eyes can see
The buoyant youth, he left behind.”
Grief has frozen mother’s arms
About his body, cold as stone
Pushed and pulled by tidal waves.
.
Years of sea cold lullabies
Whispered in his salty ears,
Once his life had slipped away.
He’d been young, a traveler,
Loved companion at the hearth,
Where, one day, he took a bone,
The hollow shaft of some great gull
And whittled it into a flute.
Then wild music rocked the waves
And blew among the flocks of birds.
.
Great auks nested there, and terns
Spun in winds above the beach.
Out at sea the supple seals
Tossed their heads above…
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Our journeys are rarely a straight path. I know, for sure, mine hasn’t been. Though I’ve written stories as long as I can remember, it never occurred to me that I could do this writing thing growing up. I came from a family riddled with poverty. If I needed money, I worked for it on my own. I held down paper routes, two at once. In the summers, I worked for a county program when I turned sixteen. For me, college was the hoped-for way out. Except when you don’t have money, it’s hard to finance it. Loans only went so far. I lasted a year-and-a-half. I came home feeling defeated, like I’d never escape this black hole called poor. Except, around that last half of college, I went to a movie with some friends called Stand by Me. When Chris Chambers’s character says to Gordy that…
