Gerry Stewart
unearthed
My Norwegian bones
resurfacing
pocked and indistinct
beneath our feet.
Jæren’s
breath-balanced walls
sweeping up fields in a tumbled
embrace.
Pot-bellied hay threshers
trundle silent,
ice etched,
scraping soil
over knuckles of stone.
The steel-gray sea
line-ruled against
the white-blush sky.
Memories eroded
nearly twenty years gone
only remnants cling
to old photographs,
the shards of language.
Overlaid in fresh layers;
the milky scoop
of a ceramic bowl
brimming with mackerel,
cobalt fire within a glaze of blood
sea-tinted,
a child shaping his own mythology
with my fertile clay
filled with a joy
of ducks
and learning to crawl,
tongue out at the wind
and spitting rain.