My Oldest Root

When people talk about roots, they point to family trees and parish records. Mine run deeper, past any surname, down into limestone and tallow smoke to a hand that pressed red earth onto a cave wall long before my language existed.

my oldest root is

a Neanderthal hand-stencil

dried on cavern stone,

fingers ghosted like a tree

reaching toward future weather

The maps they showed us in school ended their story with a blunt marker: a dead branch, some empty caves, a label that might as well have read here they failed. No one mentioned the ring of coastlines now underwater, the plains where their fires burned, or the artifacts trawled up from places that used to be home. My blood adds what the legend leaves out—a few Neanderthal genes running off the edge of the chart like a stream that slips underground. On the surface they are finished; underground they are still moving.

winter genealogy—

one trunk, side branches torn clean,

sap bright in the cut

Tonight I write by a white rectangle of screen, my hands resting where a different life might have held a scraper or spear. The blueprint in the bones hasn’t changed much; the tools have. Every line I send through fibre and air is a small test signal, checking how far that rooted pattern can travel and still answer when I call it living.

all our bright branches,

screens glowing in midnight rooms,

grow from buried fire;

we are the last green questions

at the tip of an old tree

When I follow my own line back, I don’t stop at crests or census ink. I end in a thin, unseen band beneath the frost line where iron, pigment, and old breath have settled together, quiet weight the living world keeps standing on without ever knowing its name.