....................Like flowing
           lava/Hot with sweat
Lithe muscle/Sturdy bone/The
horses course/The hillsides as if by
hell beset/magnificent as the sea/
                        As powerful as a tide
                      As if a fire runs in
                     Aching veins/God tests
                    Ancient bloodlines in them
                    And gives them reins/But
                     All in all their hearts ring
                      A leather bell on ours
                    A Vulcan strength we see/
                  And recognize fully in you
                 And me/splendid equine
        Curves as the tails arch/and
Manes stream/on arid dunes....

Arabian.

SoulSurvivor
Catherine Jarvis
12/6/2020

You often spoke of frameworks as guiding principles at all phases of life.
You spoke of structures, you spoke of lines..

Lines that when crossed with mischief, called for admonishment.
Lines you drew on our exercise books to ensure homework was complete.
Lines you made so clear guarding your babies from outside harm.
Lines that parallel the lives of all mothers.

Today as I look at you, I see those lines etched deep in tireless perseverance; a reminder of your experiences.
Those lines as you age ever so gracefully, are exactly what makes you all the more so beautiful.

i hail from heat, heat
in the heart and in the home, in the head and in the heel of the
sword that swings for both justice and action.
i inherit this love, this life and these virtues like heirlooms.
i inherit this boldness from you
i inherit the air of a highborn lady, while not without the humility of a low born daughter from you
i inherit gentle hands of craft into fists of rage and fire that melt away sorrows from you
i rise and fall, for from you
i breathe.
unspoken it was passed down, and yet it stirs and whispers to me in my bones of
ancient thought and force,
passed down from kin to kin, from one blood to another of
temperance and will
that flow like tradition—
a book written on age-old sandstone pressed eons below the earth,
text mapped in bloodlines over a body, not alone. never fading.
you bid me to rise from dust and ashes into the woman of your forging,
and so with a kiss between my brow for
farewell and fortune
i may live with your light tucked into my heart,
because my inheritance lives within me.

In her veins is the blood of
Choctaw Welsh Minoan
Flowing like the Warrior River-
Tributaries to rivulets-
(to terror for fleeing silt, at the same)
Secrets flow there as well.
The Waters Women are buoyed upon this simple fact
But in winter there comes an occasional freeze and the river goes silent,
the blood slows in the turtles nesting beside the Warrior, too cold to shift beak or claw and the Waters women will speak of other things buried deep beneath the Warrior, beneath pride and circumstance.
The Gulf clams lick the ocean floor
Blind but for taste - how can they know the tongue from the beak?
It's a mystery to me how they survive at all,
In the Gulf ocean
In the Warrior
In the Waters who live at the edge of Waterfalls, at the Warriors weeping banks, where the snow has all gone.