I was born on the downhill side, late in the year, in early December, in the light’s heavy dip and hesitation, when the old peoples prayed for beginning in the snow-salted fields and scattered bitterness of corn stalks; but though I came fatly of that gaunt race, though it was a different end and today that day, the fields untracked by supplicants, the corncribs many, and full, still I carry their disappointed dead buried in my body, and am the outspoken child of the silent generations of my cells— for O, they call with the old voices, in a millennium length of words, in the thousand year cries of the dead, that their lean voices, lost to these fields, may be gathered up and justified in me.