I like to watch my breath go up the sky,
winter nights when the sky is royal blue,
like a ghost late for heaven and climbing fast.
I think my Norse ancestors stood the same,
the snow crunching under their shuffling feet
on the late watch, breathing puffs of spirit upward.
And the Welsh magician kings, whose drops
in the sea of my blood transformed it into poetry,
watched the smoke of their incantations rise the night.
And the Dutch guildsmen tramping home on packed snow,
who live also in my blood and do the organizing,
saw the smoke of their trade unionist rants go up the sky.
And the Germans, the old Teutonic knights,
sitting in cold armor on horses breathing smoke,
surely cocked a visor nights like this and billowed breath to God.
And the Celts, blue painted like the frozen dead,
naked to the waist in the night woods waiting dawn
and the attack followed their mouth ghosts up with awestruck eyes.
And the English-men, cold angry Protestants looking for a witch
to burn the night-cold black as God’s wrath to the faint of heart
watched their souls swirl upward in the empty night.
I like to watch my breath go backward up
the rope of my genes,
each strand, some night-standing man
always looking upward,
wondering where in winter sky
the ghosts of his breath were going.
©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS
William John Watkins 