Still: The Journal

Readyease by M. Daniel McCrotty

stacked before me, motionless 

with the loam, frostfrail from springs, 

I yield you my earth, good ground, 

reworked, from one song to the next, sleeping 

here in the cool evening shade, bared within

great folds of land under readyskies. 

I give you the empty of family, 

my generations, people who 

will know my stance a hundred years

beyond death. My offered tendons 

restitch the bones of my being

to the mud of layered leaves,

rewoven through pine and needle;

plant my stone deep in this ground

among shoaled ridges and clay currents,

upright with the hope of forefathers

and simple with the readyease of children. 

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