The Singing Serpent, Part I

Here lies not an answer, but more questions to ask.

-

I made a quest for underworld.
I walked down the path that my mother took,
and her mother,
and the mothers before her.

I tried to deny
my sense of displacement,
this unending wandering for a destination unknown.

But the path is deep and dark
uncharted waters; pitch black,
with the bodies of God knows who
hidden beneath its Styxian current.
 
I arrived to what was my grandmother’s casket,
and her grandmother’s, and the grandmothers before her.

But resolution is a conundrum that asks and not answers.

Because her body has long perished,
and her corpse has long been stolen;
 
here and there, fragments
of silvery skull, scattered
across what was someone’s past;
puzzling riddles that asks further questions.

What is left in the empty casket
are mere ancestral bones, remains
of a motherly past.

Whispering with an empty, hollow whispers
—language long forgone:

What if the answer you seek are anything but one
yet many—not in statements, but as questions?

2021