Leila Ryland Swain lives and writes in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

Smoke Signals
By Leila Ryland Swain

Driving west toward blue mountains
the sky, gray with unexpressed sorrow,
hangs like a bed canopy on spikes of green trees.
Round white clouds float up behind the hills
like puffs from my father’s briar pipe;
the sweet tobacco scent is ripe in my heart.
Ancient ones may be sending urgent signals
from spacious caves hidden in precarious rock,
but I cannot read their language—
it is dense, unfamiliar.

My mother in the back seat reminds me
of my duty to the lessons she tried to teach me,
to verbs and pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions,
agreement of subject and verb.
She speaks of count to ten, this too will pass, cleanliness is
next to godliness, all the adages she was raised on.

That’s an old scenario,
I tell her, a language of discontent.
There’s another vocabulary older than that one;
it rises from mountains where owls call at night,
small birds scatter in the wind, deer drink from creeks.
The new flow of words twists my tongue
as I struggle to pronounce them.