Great grandmother of beauty in a land of unfathomable ice in a sapphire world snowlaced and unspoken, on a desolate glacial plain you sang this song sixty thousand years ago. Your vision of skies shadowed with cliffs surrendering into sky your dreams of light so pure and piercing, transformed with wonder forgotten in twilight you left these stones all splashed with ochre red as blood, your blood which sang this song sixty thousand years ago. Perhaps you knew your blood would dream again someday, be born again one day, in an endless voyage, through waves frozen and silent you reached this shore and bathed these stones in blood, you found this shore and sang alone Great grandmother of beauty born in a world lost in ice blue and wind blown trees in knotted masses weaving in the horizontal wind you chose this plain clasping a withered wreath of flowers where your glacial gods stand shimmering ice cliffs that arch and carve the sky you found a final beauty here and called it by a sound now lost Great grandmother of beauty long ago I felt your heart inside my breast for surely you are here with me in some small part I touch your ochred stones and stand beside your grave I see the ice blue cornflowers flow across a plain I dream of beauty through your eyes at night and sing a song with words unknown sent down to me across a frozen sea of sixty thousand years   (c) J.L.Stanley

Song of the Red Ochre Woman