Count ghosts
I count my ghosts in blood
ancestral strengths
disastrous and delicate traces
of grandmothers from a hundred generations

Count ghosts
count wild men who sailed
Atlantic storms
or far around the Cape

Count ghosts of farm wives
alone on prairie emptiness
weeping memory
of distant homes
and bright rose gardens

Ghosts of a peasant past
blend with proper merchant greed
poverty�s pain or singer�s
gentle seed, all blended here
in voices, love or fear
I carry with me
my own ancestral collection