Poem: The Ancestors

And the Seeker asked,

“Where are the ones who came before me?

Do they rest in the dust,

or do they linger in the wind?”

And the Sage answered:

They are not behind you,

nor are they beneath your feet.

They do not sleep in the earth,

nor do they fade with time’s forgetting.

They are here.

They are the breath between your ribs,

the weight of silence before you speak,

the hands that shaped the hands

that shaped the hands

that now reach forward into the unknown.

They walk with you,

not as ghosts but as echoes,

not as shadows but as light

hidden between the folds of your becoming.

And they do not ask for prayers.

They do not ask for offerings.

They ask only this:

Remember.

Remember the songs sung before words,

the names carried before your own.

Remember that you were not the first

to stand at the edge of the world

and wonder if the ground would hold.

They, too, have walked uncertain paths.

They, too, have stood before great walls

and known when to climb.

And when you falter,

when your voice shakes,

when your hands tremble against the weight of it all,

know this—

You do not walk alone.

For they have already carved the way in silence,

so that you may walk it in song.