For History on Behalf of my Children

I am the surrounded voice
of the forest, my history
registered in wind through trees,
the ones left standing
between human presumption and frailty.
I am the voice of the rivers
banking the nation
on the south and west,
the pulse of the living earth
you have exposed 
and been exposed to,
the voice of continuous merging,
though some deny it.

It is only human
to speak of surrender
though it may be taken as weakness
acceding to impotent power.
You who believe in nothing
prefigure as you receive.

Only in hard language
can I speak on behalf of my children
until they learn to speak
until they learn to take up
the contained wind
and its knowledge
of the millennium,
until they echo the tongue
of the river
merging past with future
at its bleeding mouth.