The Weft Remembers

The thread hums when I touch it,

a quiet recognition,

like it knows my blood

my heart

my soul.

-

My fingers move without thought;

they have done this before,

in another name,

another century,

another life.

I do not learn the motion,

I remember it.

-

The loom groans,

old wood remembering pressure,

the rhythm of calloused hands

shooting a shuttle back and forth.

Each thread stretched across the frame

is a life pulled taut.

Ancestor.

Mother.

Child.

Warped in parallel lines of time.

-

I gather the fibers like whispers,

wool from the land,

flax from the field,

the sinew of my lineage

twined through my fingertips.

-

Somewhere beneath my ribs,

the Norns murmur in their counsel.

Urðr breathes of what once was,

Verðandi threads what stands before me,

Skuld knots ahead what will become.

Their voices rise and fall

in every strike of the shuttle,

their pattern hidden but unyielding.

-

The weft binds what my genes remember:

the cradle song hummed in another tongue,

a scar that I cannot name,

the ache to build,

to gather,

to create,

to hold.

Memory doesn't fade.

it folds into the fabric of creation.

-

I weave until the hours blur,

until the loom itself grows silent and smooth,

and in the stillness,

I see what I have made:

-

A tapestry of bone and breath,

stitched by the ghosts that live in my blood.

The cloth glows faintly in the lamplight,

alive with the pulse of the lives before my own,

and I know

the pattern was never lost.

It was waiting to be gathered

from the twisting strands of my DNA.