Their Eyes Became the Stars

In the soil is where their bodies once slept
Children of bitter winters and more golden summers
What journeys were theirs are as ours
What fears and nightly visions haunted then do so now
But night fell forever over their lands of green
And their eyes became the stars
Studding the vault of the heavens for as long as the fires remain lit
Looking up at them, the stories come back to me
The songs of long-dead ghosts with forgotten names
And sometimes in the hills, in the mist, their shades move
Children of the harvest, in tombs of the earth

M.M. — 18-Jan-2014