In my land, Salmon are as gods,
great and mystical bellies of flesh
fat solid flanks of life.
Salmon are twins, and twin children are special,
linked to the mother earth and each other
by mystical ties of divided flesh.
Swimmers always return,
Springs in four years, Sockeye in two,
Driving homewards to the place of their birth
That patch of sand or pebbled bottom where milt and roe
breed new life for old,
hook-nosed and torn by the passage to these
ancestral spawning grounds thrice ten thousand years old.
This is our legacy.
Salmon are our lives, their silver bellies feed
the belly, eye and soul of markets and galleries, they are
our totem, our twinned races mirroring the breath
of each other
in the long pauses of life.
Like them we are returning home always
to the stones of our birth
to die and seek new births, new lives
the ancient dance of the water in our veins
as salt as theirs,
we swim against the stream to die,
letting our bodies be swept
back to our mothers and fathers unknown in the depths
of time at the soul of the ocean.