This week's title has something to do with my photos, old and worn our and near death, transfigured by a tasteful application of computer wigettry. But mostly it has to do with Strauss's tone poem by that name which I love and which I happen to be listening to while trying to think of a title for the post. Plus, always glad to give a shout-out to Richard Strauss.
In addition to a bit of my own stuff, I have another anthology this week,
Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. The book was published by Harper Collins in 1988.
I enjoy reading poets who come from groups who have typically received little or no notice from the larger culture. That's not to say, these groups did not always have their own poetry, often coming from an oral tradition, only that it existed at a level not apparent to the larger community. What has happened in the past is that one or two or a few poets get wide attention and become very successful and the success they achieve and the attention it brings to their group exposes other poets and encourages new poets to write. That is what happened that created what is called the Native American Renaissance, a term coined in 1983 by critic Kenneth Lincoln.
Me
slant-eyed morning
Simon J. Ortiz
Bend in the River
Me
I'd rather believe in string theory
Louis (Little Coon) Oliver
Empty Kettle
Me
four sparrows
Mary Tallmountain
Matmiya
Me
the curse of future-sight
Roberta Hill Whiteman
Reaching Yellow River
Me
like a turtle
Louise Erdrich
Family Reunion
Me
on the dark side of the moon
Peter Blue Cloud
Turtle
Me
a revelation
Lance Henson
Solitary
Day Song
Grandfather
At Chadwick's Bar and Grill
Coyote Fragments
Near Twelve Mild Point
Me
so proud of his despair
Barney Bush
Taking a Captive/1984
Me
empty streets
Roy A. Young Bear
From the Spotted Night
Me
storm riders
Gerald Vizenor
Shaman Breaks
Me
the next turning
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Journey
Me
the morning holds its breath
Me
surely the words are there
From last week, here's my first poem for this week.
slant-eyed morning
on the dim streets
of colorless barely dawn
people who get up early
look out the corner of their eyes
at other people who get up early
slant-eyed mornings
when one can't be sure
all the dark-night terrors
have returned to the secrets
of their shadow-lairs
all
the human kind
take care
until the true sun
rise
One of the most important and best known contributors to the Native American Renaissance is
Simon J. Ortiz.
Ortiz, born in 1941, an Acoma poet, short fiction writer, essayist and a documentary and feature film writer is a native of the Acoma Pueblo Community in Albuquerque. Schooled within the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Acoma Reservation, he attended the University of Iowa where he enrolled in the International Writing Program and received a masters degree in writing. Recipient of many awards ad honors, he has taught Native American literature and creative writing at San Diego State University and the University of New Mexico.
Bend in the River
Flicker flies by.
His ocher wing
is tied to prayer sticks.
Pray for mountains,
the cold strong shelter.
Sun helps me to see
where Arkansas River
ripples over pebbles,
Glacial stone moves slowly;
it will take a while.
A sandbank cuts sharply
down to a poplar log
buried in damp sand.
Shadow lengths tell me
it is afternoon.
There are tracks
at river's edge, raccoon,
coyote, deer, crow,
and now my own.
My sight follows
the river upstream
until it bends.
Beyond the bend
is more river
and, soon, the mountains.
We shall arrive,
to see, soon.
And another from last week.
I'd rather believe in string theory
pictures of customers from Walmart, which, having seen,
you can never un-see,
a regular Facebook feature, a modern "Ripley's Believe it or Not"
of the grotesque
proving
with not a doubt in my mind
the validity of
string theory and the existence
of alternate universes
I must believe that
else I am required to accept that the pictures
are of actual people from my
actual time
and of my own actual
universe
I'd rather believe in string theory...
One of the earliest poets in the book is
Louis (Little Coon) Oliver.
Oliver was a Creek Indian, descendant of the Golden Raccoon Clan of Alabama, was born in 1904 in Oklahoma and was still living in Oklahoma when the anthology was published. He died in 1991.
Empty Kettle
I do not waste what is wild
I only take what my cup
can hold.
When the black kettle gapes
empty
and children eat roasted acorns
only,
it is time to rise up early
take no drink - eat no food
sing the song of the hunter.
I see the Buck - I chant
I chant the deer chant:
"He-hebah-Ah-kay-kee-n!
My arrow, no woman has ever touched
finds its mark.
I open the way for the blood to pour
back to Mother Earth
the debt I owe.
My soul rises - rapturous
and I sing a different song,
I sing.
I sing.
These are the same sparrows from a poem last week, plus two more who learned of the morning handout.
four sparrows
four sparrows
on the window sill this morning,
the regular two,
the silver-templed Bride of Frankenstein
and her rumpled mate,
and two friends, in-laws maybe, cousins, or bowling buddies,
huddled together
apparently discombobulated by last night's hail storm
that tore through the trees,
carpeting the parking lot with leaves
as with humans after disaster,
last night seems to have brought them together
into a close cluster of brown and gray, the co-dependency
of all creatures in the face of common thread
demonstrated once
again...
they stand close on the ledge,
taking turns
picking up cookie crumbs,
feeding it to one of the others,
after-disaster feast shared
by bedraggled
survivors
Another early poet from the anthology is
Mary Tallmountain.
Tallmountain was born Mary Demonski in the interior of Alaska in 1918 of Athabaskan-Russian and Scotch-Irish ancestry.
Matmiya
for my grandmother
I see you sitting
Implanted by roots
Coiled deep from your thighs.
Roots, flesh red, centuries pale.
Hairsprings wound tight
Through fertile earthscapes
Where each layer feeds the next
Into depths immutable.
Though you must rise, must
Move large and slow
When it is time, O my
Gnarled mother-vine, ancient
As vanished ages,
Your spirit remains
Nourished ,
Nourishing me.
I see your figure wrapped in skins
Curved into a mound of earth
Holding your rich dark roots.
Matmiya,
I see you sitting.
Most people finished in 4 years. With interruptions, it took me 10. This might explain part of the reason.
the curse of future-sight
I suffered in my early university years
from an unfortunate
ability
to see the future, to know for certain
that at no point in my future
would I ever have a need to know
the various parts of a lady bug, or a cricket,
or a Bangladeshi dung beetle,
just as I knew equally well that I would never need to know
the periodic table or the cosign of quadruple davits
times one thousand three hundred and seven
and seeing the future thus
and knowing that at least two thirds of my every day
at university was a complete waste of time
that would never be returned to me, time when
such lost time might be added
to the much too short one third of my time
that actually involved thinking actual new and creative
and best of all, interesting thoughts...
I was a lousy student
I admit it
and something of an argumentative wise ass,
yes,
I have to plead to that too
but one thing
I knew
for certain - that I was smarter than the people trying to make me
smart...
there were other reasons it took me ten years
to graduate from college,
good reasons,
I'm sure,
but also sure that the
above played some part in
it
(Notice how I put that little "it" right there on a line by itself. The poetry experts hate that, they just really, really hate it, probably have some kind of fancy negative-sounding name for it, but I like it so I do it anyway, probably a throwback to my earlier college career and the reason now I'll never graduate out of poetry college in my lifetime and that of my male and female descendants unto the third generation yet to come. Even at this late age still I insist on pissing-off the professors)
Next from the anthology, this longer poem by
Roberta Hill Whiteman.
Born in 1947 in the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, Whiteman is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and is recipient of numerous awards and honors for her work.
Reaching Yellow River
in memory of Mato Henlogeca's grandson
"It isn't a game for girls,"
he said, grabbing a fifth
with his right hand,
the wind with his left.
"For six days
I raced Jack Daniels.
He cheated, told jokes.
Some weren't even funny.
That's how he come to won.
It took a long time
to reach the Yellow River
I'm not yet thirty,
or it is thirty-one?
Figured all my years
carried the same hard thaw.
Out here, houselights hid
deep inside the trees.
For a while i believed this road
cut across to Spring Creek
and I was trucking home.
I could kid you now,
say I ran it clean,gasping on one lung,
loaded by a knapsack
of distrust and hesitation.
I never got the tone
in all the talk of cure.
I sang Honor Songs, crawled
the railroad bridge to Canada.
Dizzy from the ties,
I hung between both worlds.
Clans of blackbirds circled
the nearby maple trees.
The dark heart of me said
no days more than these.
As sundown kindled the sumacs,
stunned by the river's smile,
I had no need for heat,
no need to feel ashamed.
Inside me then the sound
of burning leaves. Tell them
I tumbled through a gap on the horizon.
No, say I stumbled through a hummock
and fell in a pit of stars
When rain weakened my stride,
I heard them singing
in a burl of white ash
took a few more days to rave
at them in this wood.
then their appaloosa snickered
in the dawn and they came
riding down a close ravine.
Though the bottle was empty,
I still hung on. Fox tails beat
the grimace from my brow
until I took off my pain
like a pair of old boots.
I became a hollow horn filled
with drain, reflecting everything.
The wind in my hand
burned cold as hoarfrost
when my grandfather nudged me
and called out
my Lakota name."
This is from earlier this year, another one that I set aside that looks better now than it did when I set it aside.
like a turtle
like a turtle
on a flat rock
in a frothing, rushing
stream,
the closer I get
to going someplace
I wanted so to go, the
less I want to
go there
the grass
being greener
until I decide to graze there
not the fence -
but the quickly eroding fancy
which
is why, like a turtle,
I hardly ever go anywhere
and when I do
it takes me forever to get there
Next from near the end of the anthology, poet
Louise Erdrich.
Erdrich, born in 1954, is an Ojibwa member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. She writes poetry, novels and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings.
This poem is an example of the storytelling tradition that I love and that is central to so much Native American poetry.
Family Reunion
Ray's third new car in half as many years.
Full cooler in the trunk, Ray sogging the beer
as I solemnly chauffeur us through the brush
and up the backroads, hardly cowpaths and hub-deep in
mud.
All day the sky lowers, clears, lowers again.
Somewhere in the brush near Saint John
there are uncles, a family, one mysterious brother
who stayed on the land when Ray left for the cities.
One week Ray is crocked. We've been through this before.
Even, as a little girl, hands in my dress,
Ah punka, you's my Debby, come and ki me.
The the road ends in a yard full of dogs.
Them's Indian dogs, Ray says, lookit how they know me.
And they do seem to know him, like I do. His odor -
rank beef of fierce turtle pulled dripping from Metagoshe,
and the inflammable man smell: hair tonic, ashes,alcohol.
Ray dances an old woman up in his arms.
Fiddles rel on the phonograph and I sink apart
in a corner, start knocking the Blue Ribbons down.
Four generations of people live here.
No one remembers Raymond Two Bears.
So what.The walls shiver, the house caulked with mud
sails back into the middle of Metagoshe.
A three-foot long snapper is hooked on a trout line,
so mean that we do not dare wrestle him in
but tow him to shore, heavy as an old engine.
The somehow Ray pries the beak open and shoves
down a cherry bomb. Lights the string tongue.
Headless and clenched in its armor, the snapper
is lugged home in a trunk for tomorrow's soup.
Ray rolls it beneath a bush in the backyard and goes in
to sleep his own head off. Tomorrow I find
that the animal has dragged itself off.
I follow torn tracks up a slight hill and over
into a small stream that deepens and widens into a marsh.
Ray finds his way back through the room into his arms.
When the phonograph stops, he slumps hard in his hands
and the boys and their old man fold him into the car
where he curls around his bad heart, hearing how it knocks
and rattles in the bars of his ribs to break out.
Somehow we find our way back. Uncle Ray
sings and old song to the body that pulls his
toward home. the gray fins that his hands have become
screw their bones in the dashboard. His face
has the odd, calm patience of a child who has always
let bad wounds alone, or a creature that has lived
for a long time underwater. And the angels come
lowering their slings and litters.
Here's another from a couple of months ago.
on the dark side of the moon
the Apollo 10 astronauts
heard
music on the dark side of the moon
I read that today from recently
released NASA files
maybe Jimi or Janice
or Nelson Eddie
passing
by
one last passage
of the dark
side
taking time on the way
for one last gig,
their time come to light the night,
to join the stars
who passed before, shining
still in all their final
star-spangled
glory
~~~
Apollo 10 astronauts
heard music on the far side of the moon, they said,
where the stars at night
are big and
bright
deep in the heart of mystery
~~~
the Apollo 10 astronauts
reported hearing
music
on the dark side of the moon...
I hope so
The next poet from the Native American anthology is
Peter Blue Cloud.
Blue Cloud, a Canadian Mohawk poet and folklorist was born in 1935 died in 2011. This poem is one of his best known.
What a wonderful tale this is, so wonderfully told.
Turtle
The winds are dark passages among the stars,
leading to whirling void pockets
encircled by seeds of thought,
life force of the Creation.
I am turtle,
and slowly, my great flippers move
propelling my body through space,
and starflowers scatter crystals
which fall as mist upon my lidded eyes.
I am turtle,
of the ocean of my life swim
is a single chant in the Creation,
as I pass others of my kind,
my own, unborn and those,
the holy ancients of my childhood.
My swim is steady and untiring,
for great is the burden given me,
the praise and privilege of my eternity
rests upon my back as a single seed
to which I am guardian and giver.
I am turtle,
and my tribes forever remain countless,
from the day I first raised my head
to gaze back upon the horn of my body,
and my head was a sun
and Creation breathed life upon the seed
and four times, and again four times,
I wept for joy the birthing of my tribes,
and chanted Creation the glory
of all these wondrous days.
The wrinkles and cracks upon this ancient shell
are the natural contours created
by he feel and request to burdened rock
and soil, blood and sustenance to
clans within clans,
I am turtle,
and the earth I carry is but
a particle in the greater Creation,
my mountains, plains and oceans
mere reflections in a vaster sea
Turtle I am called,
and breathe clouds of rain,
and turn slowly my body to seasons
in cycle with my grandchild, Eagle,
whose wings enfold thunder pulses,
back to back, and
seldom meeting in time.
Patience was given me by Creation,
ancient song on tomorrow's wind
this chant that was taught my tribes
is now unsung by many clans
of a single tribe,
and truly
such pains that exist for this moment,
which slay so many of the innocent
cannot but end in pain repeated
as all are reflected twins to self
I am turtle,
and await the council of my tribes
clan into clan, the merging thought
that evil was never the star path, and
then the chant to the four directions,
I am turtle,
and death is not yet my robe,
for drums still throb the many
centers of my tribes, and a young
child smiles me of tomorrow,
"and grandparent,"
another child whispers, "please,
tell again my clan's beginning."
From last week.
a revelation
forever helpful
have I always been,
especially to old people,
open doors for them,
say thank you,
please,
yes ma'am, yes sir,
and
every since
I was a young man
always made sure
I didn't park in the spaces
closest to the entrance
when going to the supermarket
or a restaurant or even to the mall,
thinking those spaces
ought to be left to the older folks
who might have trouble walking from
more distant parking places...
then,
driving into the parking lot
of my favorite diner
this evening,
I first headed out to my usual
parking spot in the far corner,
near the discount furniture warehouse
and the hooch-koochi topless
bar, and the "Great Looks" beauty parlor,
and the Church of Divine Debt Relief,
and the other place with a yellow and green
neon depiction of a reclining woman
with large breasts on the window
by the door with a small sign, "Good Rubs,"
my good
deed for the old
folks, I was thinking, when,
it was like a revelation
from the blue,
I realized
I didn't need to leave a parking spot
close to the door for an older
person-because, by god, I am one
myself
and with that resonating
in my mind
I
parked my ass
right by the door
you betcha...
Next from the anthology I have several shorter poems by
Lance Henson.
Henson is a Cheyenne poet, born in Washington D.C. in 1944, but raised in the traditions of the Cheyenne tribe by his grandparents in Oklahoma. He has published 28 volumes of poetry and has been translated into 25 languages.
Solitary
on a cold night
i forget the story of my birth
i forget the long fingers of sleep
the magic of names
to go alone
i begin by asking the winds
forgiveness
Day Song
perhaps on a sunday
like today
under the sound of a lone bell
perhaps in the brightest snow of the year
or in autumn
while the leaves are in their last clothes
someone will lie down
feeling in his blood a singing wind
that in all his days
he has witnessed
only once
when dust stopped on the shivering road
and looked into the mirror
Grandfather
grandfather
my heart looks toward you
red sage of sunset
evening star
the night hawk sings
your name
At Chadwick's Bar and Grill
a sky the color of a wren's breath
hangs over red clouds
hint of rain
and home is dirt underfoot
tu fu and li po have
forgiven nothing
not waking drunk under any moon
or the incessant calling
of a loon
so waiting is the roses own
signature
the spider catches a fly
at morning
whether i am there
or not
coyote fragments
1
he is rust
in moonlight
2
when the road man paused
we heard our brother's voice
3
one track
in snow
4
eight without ears
hang upside down from fence posts
near hammon oklahoma
5
the moonlight splashes
in their eyes
near twelve mile point
for my grandparents
at times the heart looks toward open fields
and sees itself returning
orange pall of sun
the low hymn of trees
in the garden
a north wind blows over dry stalks of corn
birds gather there
scratching over the echoing footsteps
you names
have become the dark feather
to whom the stars sing
This is a thing from February that I never got around to using.
so proud of his despair
walking Bella
in the cold, dim morning
thinking of the poet
at last night's open mic
mumbling
dark and terrible visions
into his lap
so enamored
with life's blackest nights
so captivated
by his misery
so proud
of his despair...
The next poem is by
Barney Bush.
Barney Bush, despite what Wikipedia tried to tell me, is not the dog of George W. Bush.
This Barney Bush is a Shawnee/Cayuga poet and indigenous activist born in 1946 in Herod, Illinois. With a BA from Fort Lewis College and an MA in English and fine arts from the University of Idaho. He is the author of a number of books and a music/spoken word recordings.
Taking a Captive/1984
A light drizzle falling off
and on for days
Kentucky hills yellow leaves
matted to damp black your pensive eyes in smokey hollows
My son you are born by
mistake in another world where
your vision lingers too
long
too long to reach those who
seek wisdom from the future
Three generations back in
my village you would be
painted have a name
waylahskese
You would carry a flute of
polished cedar inlaid with
finest abalone shell bound
with soft white buckskin
On humid evenings I would hear
your cavernous melodies
rolling off limestone bluffs
above Spaylaway Theepi
You would grow into manhood
bringing fresh meat to the
door of your grandmothers
weegiwa carry your
opahwahka in the oracle of
your heart
Stalking figures yet roam
shadows of colonial america
yet drawing breath continuous
memory absorbed into blood
Your divorced tiger form spoors
its way to my heart not as
a killer but as one off grace
Here in my center M'qua seeks
power to bring you home sniffs
the air for winter
too soon shemegana pepoou
Your real name awaits
Come into your dreams my young
captive Hear the hawk shriek
as he soars outside your window
come into the lodge of winter
dreams hibernate with the
bear.
If you like dim, dreary, soggy days, this one is for you. Actually I usually like that kind of day but I have to drive to Austin in a little bit and I'm not looking forward to it - crazy traffic on wet roads.
empty streets
empty streets
glisten,
the city bound
by mist and deep fog like the pretty girl
tied to the railroad track,
Snidely Whiplash
somewhere lurking,
smirking,
rubbing his little paws together
like a rat over a chunk
of soggy, dripping
cheese
```
a dreary Saturday
to wake up
to
even
the tiny sparrows seem
lethargic
as they gather round the cookie crumbs
I left on the window sill
big storms
coming
and
I have to drive to Austin
in an hour
Next from the Native American anthology is
Ray A. Young Bear.
Born in 1950 on the Meskwaki tribal settlement in Iowa, Young Bear spoke Meskwaki as his first language until taught English by his grandmother. He is poet and novelist writing about contemporary Native American life in both languages.
From the Spotted Night
In the blizzard
while chopping wood
the mystical whistler
beckons my attention.
Once there were longhouses
here. A village.
In the abrupt spring floods
swimmers retrieved our belief.
Their spirit remains.
From the spotted night
distant jets transform
inter fireflies who float
towards me like incandescent
snowflakes.
The leather shirt
which is suspended
on a wire hanger
above the bed's headboard
is humanless; yet when one
stands outside the house,
the strenuous sounds
of dressers and boxes
being moved can be heard.
We believe someone wears
the shirt and rearranges
the heavy furniture,
although nothing
is actually changed.
Unlike the Plains Indian shirts
which repelled lead bullets,
ricocheting from them
in fiery sparks,
this shirt is the means;
this shirt is the bullet.
This is from last month, another wet day, a welcome wet day in a land of frequent drought.
storm riders
misty wet this morning
but strong thunderstorms predicted,
sweeping across Mexico and the Gulf, beginning this
afternoon and extending through the week,
inundating most of Texas, especially here
in the south where the first strong
winds and rain will pass
and I am here, looking out through the coffeehouse's
broad windows, waiting for Armageddon,listening
for the distant call of the Horsemen's trumpets,
the thunder of the drums of their army
marching
and even though I know there will be suffering for some,
I look forward to the advancing pillage, a storm rider,
taunting the elements here from my protected
saddle, enjoying the ferocious drama of its
passage
making me, I suppose, a kind of war lover, a shameful
passion some say should shame me but I expect
I will not be embarrassed for I am a man
past his prime who has no use for
golf or the various spectator
sports that set an old
man's blood
a'churning
instead I will take my excitement wherever
I can find it, like here in my comfortable
seat where the thunder can rumble
but the lightning does not strike
and the wind does not
blow and the rain
does not
fall
Gerald Vizenor is the next poet from this week's anthology. He was born in 1934 in Minnesota and is an Anishinaabe and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Author of more than 30 published books, he was director of Native American studies and is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
Shaman Breaks
1
colonists
unearth their wealth
and tease
the old stone man
over the breaks
moths batter
the cold windows
their light
in not our day
leaves abide the seasons
the last crows
smarten the poplars
2
tourists
discover their ruins
and mimic
the old stone woman
over the breaks
nasturtiums
dress the barbed wire
fences down
down to the wild sea
magnolias
bloom under a whole moon
words fall apart
3
soldiers
bleach the landscapes
hound the shamans
wild stories
break from the stones
This is another piece I wrote earlier (February) and never used.
the next turning
spring's green canopy
spreads above my street
and that which seemed
so dead reveals itself to have
only slumbered, the end
of all pushed aside
for a new beginning,
revealed
in the deep shadows
beneath the spreading
green...
outside
the cold winds of the season's
last norther, a last gasp, winter's
dark days remediated
by the blue umbrella
of this morning's clear bright
sky
a reminder of passing days,
leading as always to the
evolution, day by day, to
the something new we have
seen before and hope
to see again through the next
turning
This is the last poem from this weeks Native America anthology. It is by
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn.
An editor, poet, essayist, novelist and academic, Cook-Lynn is a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, born in 1930 on Crow Creek reservation in South Dakota and is graduate of the University of South Dakota. She is considered an important presence in the discipline of Native American and Indigenous studies.
Journey
I.
Dream
Wet, sickly
smells of cattle yard silage fill the prairie air
far beyond the timber; the nightmare only just
begun, a blackened cloud moves past the sun
to dim the river's glare, a malady of modern times.
We prayed
to the giver of prayers and traveled to the spirit
mounds we thought were forever; awake, we feared that
hollow trees no longer hid the venerable ones we were
taught
to believe in
II
Memory
Dancers with cane whistles,
the prairie's wise and knowing kinsmen.
They trimmed their deer skins
in red down feathers,
made drum sticks from the gray grouse,
metaphorically speaking, and knocked on doors
which faced the East.
Dancers with cane whistles,
born under the sign of hollow stems,
after earth and air and fire and water
you conjure faith to clear the day.
Stunningly, blessed you pierce the sky
with sound so clear each winged creature soars.
In my mind Grandmothers, those old partisans of faith
who long for shrill and glowing rituals of the past,
recall the times they went on long communal
buffalo hunts; because of this they tell the
lithe and lissome daughters:
look for men who know the sacred ways
look for men who wear the white-striped quill
look for dancers with cane whistles
and seek the house for relatives to stay the night.
III
Sacristans
This journey though another world, beyond bad dreams
beyond the memories off a murdered generation,
cartographed in captivity by bare survivors
makes sacristans of us all.
The old ones go our bail, we oblate preachers of our tribes.
Be careful, they say, don't hock the beads of
kinship agonies; The moire-effect of unfamiliar hymns
upon our own, a change in pitch or shrillness of the voice
transforms the waves of song to words of poetry or prose
and makes distinctions
no one recognizes.
Surrounded and absorbed, we treat like Etruscans
on the edge of useless law; we pray
to the givers of prayers, we give the cane whistle
in ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chain
of incense burners. Migration makes
new citizens of Rome.
We're having a nice wet spring, almost too wet for some. Heavy rains last week with baseball sized hail causing a lot of damage in parts of the city. It looks like more is coming this afternoon and the rest of the week.
the morning holds its breath
the morning
holds its breath
as storms gather in the west.
coming this way, pushing ahead warnings
of heavy rain, flash floods, hail, and general misery
for creatures, man or beast, without cover
people walk slow, cars that pass
on Broadway move as if thick, turgid air
is holding them back from their usual
pace, passing quietly through
the dense morning as if encased in
a prophylactic envelop
I've put the cookie crumbs
on the window sill as usual, but so far
my family of greedy sparrows
has not appeared, snugged away
in the strongest nest between the strongest limbs
of the strongest trees, waiting,
as the morning holds
its breath, for the big exhale that
will rock their arboreal
world
Here it is, last for the week, written in desperation a couple of months ago.
surely the words are there
Bella waits for me in the car,
knowing by way of her inner clock
that's it's time for her walk...
meanwhile
my poem for the day
is only those three lines above
and now the three that follow
that three...
it is a beautiful day and surely
there should be additional lines
beyond, again, these
I'm pretty sure the words are there
for they are, for better or worse, always
there
but I think I'll never find them
as long as the dog sits in the car staring...
I think it's time to walk the dog while the words
that surely are bubble and brew...
~~~~~
well, hell, wrong again...
the poet who cannot poem...
like the mighty Casey who has
struck out
As usual, everything belongs to who made it. You're welcome to use my
stuff, just, if you do, give appropriate credit to "Here and Now" and
to me
Also as usual, I am Allen Itz owner and producer of
this blog, and diligent seller of books, specifically these and
specifically here:
Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBookstore, Sony eBookstore, Copia, Garner's,
Baker & Taylor, eSentral, Scribd, Oyster, Flipkart, Ciando and Kobo (and, through
Kobo, brick and mortar retail booksellers all across America and abroad)
Poetry
New Days & New Ways
Places and Spaces
Always to the Light
Goes Around Comes Around
Pushing Clouds Against the Wind
And, for those print-bent, available at Amazon and select
coffeehouses in San Antonio
Seven Beats a Second
Fiction
Sonyador - The Dreamer
Peace in Our Time
first 2 and 4th photos wonderful- wonderful poem below-
I enjoy reading poets who come from groups who have typically received little or no notice from the larger culture. That's not to say, these groups did not always have their own poetry, often coming from an oral tradition, only that it existed at a level not apparent to the larger community. What has happened in the past is that one or two or a few poets get wide attention and become very successful and the success they achieve and the attention it brings to their group exposes other poets and encourages new poets to write. That is what happened that created what is called the Native American Renaissance, a term coined in 1983 by critic Kenneth Lincoln.
slant-eyed morning
on the dim streets
of colorless barely dawn
people who get up early
look out the corner of their eyes
at other people who get up early
slant-eyed mornings
when one can't be sure
all the dark-night terrors
have returned to the secrets
of their shadow-lairs
all
the human kind
take care
until the true sun
rise
One of the most important and best known contributors to the Native American Renaissance is Simon J. Ortiz.
Ortiz, born in 1941, an Acoma poet, short fiction writer, essayist and a documentary and feature film writer is a native of the Acoma Pueblo Community in Albuquerque. Schooled within the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Acoma Reservation, he attended the University of Iowa where he enrolled in the International Writing Program and received a masters degree in writing. Recipient of many awards ad honors, he has taught Native American literature and creative writing at San Diego State University and the University of New Mexico.
Bend in the River
Flicker flies by.
His ocher wing
is tied to prayer sticks.
Pray for mountains,
the cold strong shelter.
Sun helps me to see
where Arkansas River
ripples over pebbles,
Glacial stone moves slowly;
it will take a while.
A sandbank cuts sharply
down to a poplar log
buried in damp sand.
Shadow lengths tell me
it is afternoon.
There are tracks
at river's edge, raccoon,
coyote, deer, crow,
and now my own.
My sight follows
the river upstream
until it bends.
Beyond the bend
is more river
and, soon, the mountains.
We shall arrive,
to see, soon.
grate p;hotos this issue- a run of peak photos-
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