Living the Dream

Mother, I have been lost from you,
like a child wandering through histories
to be taken captive and held hostage.
Your lap is empty.
Your breasts no longer succor me,
no arms hold me to you in embrace
as I suckle your stories from you
in order to know great truths
to live and love by, in the wicked world.
No longer can I hide in your skirts
to find shade and solace.

My bed is not your bed. This is strange,
this empty home I rise to. The echoes
from far away are hopeless for me
for I am frozen aground,
in this orphanage where sins of omission
are only those that would keep me
from rising, in spite of it all.

Sing to me, through the roots of it,
let this marker make music
only a child of yours can hear.

How lonely you look. I shall rise
and shelter your leavings.

Tags: Poems by Shewolf
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If this is how it is to end, let us not go splintered,
but let us die, pointing our fingers
to a lonely world that’s wildly wintered
so our history freezes and evidence lingers

that others may know, it was not our choice,
or fate, or luck, or lengthy lack of blessed be
but necessary this ghoulish voice
forever remembered by man and tree

that once we were, and still we are,
all of us, fine and forested fitful races
that did arise from soiled events and sanded bar
to take our rightful and honored places.

Tags: Poems by Shewolf
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So many little deaths,
such macabre monuments
pointing their fingers upwards
from frozen ground.
We can not let the frozen fury
of their last clench of our air
go unnoticed.

Iceman,
clothed in desire,
carrying the medicine bag,
an ax, a net,
did your fingers clutch the snow
and trap it with its promise
to hold you until time to return;
A message to us, that we are old
and 5000 years is nothing but time
until finding you was evidence
that we must cling to those old ways
of remembering.

Chief Joseph, I know your story
of defeat and peaceful surrender
to the fate of future.
Your words are reaching up,
from that frozen battlefield,
where festers a mighty return
of those cut down.

My sister, found in Alaska’s frozen tundra,
your lung-traced evidence
of a hand-delivered virus
speaks of the end to much of us;
Your story will tell of those that came to conquer,
to own, even if it meant
grinding the bones of our ancestors,
to become a part
of their sick ownership
they have no imaginings of.

We own this; this area of land
decimated by a conscious decision
to simply scrape all evidence
of what was important, level it,
as if a few bare branches had nothing to tell.

Oh, tell! Tell the ongoing story
of our endings. Write it with the tips of branches
with toes, with arched and stiff torment;
the stopped-breath silence
of a forest and a people cleared.

Tags: Poems by Shewolf
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I see a mother bent of her downed child
on the sands of Sand Cree,
on the knee that was wounded,
off the side of a trail
along that crying place
where other’s tears
represented the stone-faced sorrow.

No one bothered to bury you.
The wind, therefore, carries your moans,
saddened sighs of the sacrificed,
and stunning stories of the sacrifice.

We stand on guard, we do, like your family
off on the hated horizon,
that is every bit as vulnerable
to the whims of Man.

My children, seen by the grieving
Eye of God, day after day;
a reminder of ill-worn gratitude.

Rise. Show them your new green shoots
of survival. Feed on the bones of our ancestors
to become a mighty tribe of truth

and peace, and peace.

Peace to those who were left uncovered.
Peace to those who could not have known
a mowed down field or forest or family
have their own ways of rising.

Tags: Poems by Shewolf
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coffee pot is left on
stale brown sludge
waits for her return
burned grounds
thick syrup
holds her spot
clings to the curtains
to remind her of her place
here, where the pot is used
to the touch of her hand
and it reciprocates
by brewing stange blends
for years after
she goes missing

Tags: A Cup of Coffee and Care, Poems by Shewolf
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