Living the Dream

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 //