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Christopher Gherman is a poet whose work emerges from the interwoven landscapes of ancestry, ecology, and memory. His writing explores the conversation between his pre-Christian Celtic roots and the Indigenous memory of the land he inhabits, tracing the echoes of old ways through the shifting realities of the present.

Born and raised in Marion, OH, Christopher’s poetry carries the weight of place—its histories, absences, and unspoken inheritances. His work moves through themes of embodiment, fatherhood, loss, and the sacred, often finding resonance in the ordinary and the ephemeral: a vulture’s wingbeat, rust freckling a transmission tower, the silence of drought-parched earth.

Alongside poetry, Christopher’s creative practice has spanned music and painting, each medium shaping his evolving relationship to sound, texture, and form. His background in jazz and composition informs the rhythm and breath of his verse, while his paintings share a similar attentiveness to presence and absence, seen and unseen.

Christopher is currently undertaking an artist residency focused on poetry and Ancestral pre-Christian European Indigeneity in conversation with the land of Terradise Nature Center. He lives in Delaware, OH, with his wife, Whitney, their daughter, Isa, their dog, cat, chickens, and beloved community. He serves as Director of Data for the YMCA of Central Ohio Head Start Program.

Blood & River: A Remembering

I first came to Terradise three years ago for a residency in which I recorded field sounds and composed music from the cries of geese and the hum of the river. For this residency, I returned with a desire to deepen that experience through poetry – and through a more conscious engagement with what Pegi Eyers names as European Indigenous Knowledge, specifically my Celtic ancestry within what is now Britain, Ireland, France, and Germany. Alongside that journey, I’ve also been reckoning with the Indigenous memory held by the land I now stand, live on, and work with: the ancestral lands of the Wyandotte, the Shawnee, the Lenape, and the earlier mound-building peoples like the Adena, Hopewell, and Fort Ancient cultures.

It is in this liminal space, between past and present, dream and waking, land and memory, that I rooted this project. My poetry has always emerged from a meditative, present-moment place, guided by family, land, and memory, and so it was a challenge to give myself such a focused agenda. But the discipline of staying within these parameters allowed me to deepen into the questions that linger in such threshold spaces.

Blood & River: A Remembering is a poetic act of ancestral recall, an attempt to walk the terrain between history and myth, between my Celtic forebears and the enduring Indigenous presence in this land.

In these poems, I draw on stories carried by the body and the earth, like Blodeuwedd rising from wildflowers, or the bog prince spiraling in a peat-dark offering. I am not attempting to reconstruct the past, but listening for its echoes in the present. The war horn’s cry, the feathered hush of geese, the scent of woodsmoke – these are all portals. My hope is that each poem is a small invocation, a reaching back, and a rootedness here.

This collection does not aim to resolve the traumatic ruptures of time or colonization, but to move within them, to speak from the threshold. I write with the hope that memory might be a current we step into, a joining of blood and river, a remembering shaped by the present.

To help orient the reader, I’ve included brief introductions to the myths, histories, and rituals referenced in each poem. My hope is that these notes will deepen the reader’s engagement and allow the poems to resonate more fully.

In medieval Welsh myth, Blodeuwedd is a woman magically conjured from flowers to be the bride of Lleu, a man cursed never to have a human wife and protected by magical conditions that make him nearly impossible to kill. Though made for Lleu, Blodeuwedd falls in love with Gronw, a mortal warrior more at home in the living earth than in spells, and the two plot Lleu’s death only to fail when Lleu returns transformed as an eagle and kills Gronw on the banks of the river Afon Cynfal. For her betrayal, Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl, banished from daylight and the floral beauty from which she came. Blodeuwedd’s story can be found in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi.

The Fate of All That Is Wild

The banks of the river were still soggy
with the memory of high water.
Brush, bony limbs of honeysuckle,
trout lilies swimming in wet grass,
their speckled leaves wriggling
like a mudskipper’s tail fin
as they burrow in the mire.

We walked along the banks of the Whetstone,
my friend and I,
the flowers apprehensive to meet the sun in our presence,
weary we might imagine conjuring them to life
through magic of our own making,
our Blodeuwedd,
born of springbeauty, sycamore, and bluebell,
who wonders:

“Are you Lleu, cursed always to remain
at arm’s length from the comfort
of a woman’s blood-warmed flesh,
whose magic is the manipulation of nature
for your pleasure?

Are you Gronw, the radiant warrior,
who lies down with mossy earth,
indistinguishable from Us –
from daffodil, forsythia, and stone –
whose fate is the fate of all that is wild?”

We stopped under a young box elder
as the wind and river carried on downstream,
and I remembered,
by no magic of my own,
the Wyandotte who stood
where I stand now.

The carnyx was an ancient Celtic war horn, used between 200 BCE and 200 CE, especially in Iron Age Europe. It was a long, bronze instrument held vertically, with the bell shaped like an animal’s head, often a boar or serpent, which produced a deep, eerie, wailing sound. The carnyx was used in battle to intimidate enemies and rally troops, and it’s haunting tones likely echoed across hills and forests, stirring both fear and awe.

In April

Geese are everywhere.
Their oil-black snake of a neck
coiling around the sudden awareness 

of this wingless stranger, 

bound to sound by nature,
where moving in the world is

a simultaneous declaration of presence:

The scuffle of denim,
the pinging of car keys and carabiner.
Breathing as we do –
clumsily, off-key, still buzzing our lips
as the wooded overture carries on.
Sometimes sniffling,
other times low groans as we pull our boots uphill –
then slough off those efforted grunts
with a sigh.

Or their own kin
slithering their swollen bodies in secret,
as a mated pair close in
on the feathered lovers at the pond’s edge.
The long-tubed sheen of a dark bronze neck –
unsheathed – and with wooden tongues quivering
in their toothy black mouths,
sound the carnyx
with a scream.