Communion: Rites of an Alamance Riverkeeper

A poem of praise for the Transparent Serpent

Barred Owl, Ink and Colored Pencil on paper by Sarah C. Rose

Friend, listen. We offspring of the Transparent Serpent have always cared for each other.

I am a priest of the many-eyed Watcher, and you are a winged seed drifting over my bone pyre.

You are riverbirch fallen into the current and I am the rotkeeper, tending the fruits springing from your flesh.

I am the breath of the wind in the maples, and you are the flicker licking windthrown ants from the dirt.

You are an ascending star, and I am the horizon. You are the moon and I the mountain.

I am the deer on the road bursting with spoilage, and you are the mite riding astride a carrion beetle, arriving to feast.

I was born to be a bearmother, and you the hunter following me across the night sky.

You are the ice, shaped by my warm paw print.

I am the elderberry bush, you are my berry, shat from cloaca of a flying brown thrasher. You are my sky-

tumbling seed, my future yet to sprout.

Hear me friend. You are not lost. How could you be when we are both right here?