Laura Garrard

The Megalithic Circle Speaks To My Bones

Ancestral genes breach the volcanic stones,

Grab my feet, 

Enter my veins in solidarity.

Though generations have passed

Between me and famine immigration,

Intermarried family farming the New Country,

I am a wandering mut still,

Visitor from home, groping for belonging,

Afloat in place anxiety,

The West Coast tethering my goat.

In Ireland, I hear my harvest-centered community

Laugh through the Passage Tombs.

They grind grain, weave wool, chisel 

With bone, hone harmony and strength

To lift twelve-ton rocks, honor their dead

As much as their own lives and walk

Shared steps as co-creation stories.

In turn, they are remembered and felt

After death reaching for the feet

Of great-grandchildren

In the setting Solstice light.

My Body Is In Ireland Today

among the bard stories of myth and reason,

the whistle and bodhrán of traditional music,

rolling emerald hills, stone-fenced,

black-faced sheep in every quarter,

the smell of damp heather in castle dew,

mystical healing wells of prayer and promise.

I lean into island softness, rooted connection,

Cliffs of Moher basalt and sea-pinks underfoot,

midge bites at sunset over the Killarney,

colossal cascade into Lough Inchiquin

past Uragh standing stone and passage tomb,

where spirit strength not my own

casts away sturdy walking poles.

I wind the narrow road treasure of Black Valley,

warm my bones with stew at the Gap of Dunloe,

then roam Muckross Abbey where

I further rut the stone-floored corridors

to quench the monk of my womb,

circle the yew that consumes the cloister,

inspires sacred steps for the eternal.

I explore the tip of wild Celtic as it waves

toward young struggling America, Beara Way

feathering sandstone into the Atlantic, 

where I ask for your embrace to stay

the Irish romance greening inside me.

Make me your passionate lover once again,

take me back to my heather land.

Gros Ventre, Wyoming

pronounced ‘Gro Vaunt’ meaning, ‘big belly’

Does the river rush past

    or see me

        with her glacial silt?

    I don’t want to leave

this torrent.

I dive in, fill

    my cells with muddy

        snowmelt, flow.

    Breathe into

ancient amphibian lungs,

drop finally to her 

    round-stone river bed,

        become Gros Ventre.

        Awaken with my back 

to sunned cottonwood.

‘May I sit on your skirt?’

    ‘Yes, I’m strong, 

        embedded in rocky 

    water-packed earth.’

Her roots mold my fleshy legs.

    Loam and grass

        cushion rest.

        Aged sage scent

wraps around 

and down 

        woven rough bark,

            and I, a part.

        One tear salts 

sacred pause.

I’m home, 

    washed,

        Gros Ventre.