Living the Dream

Don’t weigh this blood and wonder at percentages and degrees
of ‘Nativeness’ or naturalization and connections
to some select Tribe or belonging to one Band.

I am all of this and more, for I was a captured child
trying to cling to steeples and podiums
that left slivers and shards of someone else’s truth
festering beneath my skin.

Don’t ask me what my Treaty Number is.
It simply disappeared or fell to fire,
or fluttered in some ill wind
when someone was burning crosses.

I have felt the dying ash of faith’s flame
sputter at the words and demands,
cruel criticisms and commandments
carving name on some box
I was supposed to fit into.

Don’t ask me what resources I have rights too.
I have been rowing upstream all my life,
trying to get to some slow Heli
where I can rest from the near-drowning
while learning to swim in a baptismal font.

When I dipped into the Great Slave Lake,
I felt new and connected to my ancestors.
No dipping could have renewed my faith,
no swelling of the bosom has billowed so
as when I held my breath and ducked
under the memory of having been here before.

Don’t ask where my green eyes and red hair came from,
nor how I came to have blond children,
nor how odd I must feel looking out
upon a sea of brown faces and black braided hair,
how strange it is to listen to what should be
a foreign tongue wrap around my history.

It is not the color of my skin,
but the color of my soul.
I can tell you what they say, you know,
my heart translates the words of my mother-tongue.

Don’t presume to wonder that I do not wear
feathers and beads and demand proof by asking
the wrong questions or seek the paper gods’
positive identification, nor ask how it is
I got so educated and know the things I know.

I know when to wear a skirt, an amulet,
and what to say to identify myself
when I enter the dark round of the sweat.
I know my lineage as far as I can discover it
but know more about my spiritual ancestors
who come to teach me and to try me.

Don’t tell me what I should believe and when,
nor tell me what words must be said and what way.
I am Native American, I take my teachings
from the trees, the winds, the moon, the dreams,
the elders who have taken my soul under their wing
and kept them safe from predators who would choke
me with their thou shalts and thou shalt nots.

I know I am here to take care of the Garden
and the garden will take care of me.  My family
is the whole family of Creator; four colors,
four gifts, four ways to express spirit.
I have not need for four squares.  The Universe
is my chapel.  My angels are the feathered ones.
My prophets are my elders.  My soul is safe
from fetters of an unfolding world.  I am a gift
to the world as you are a gift to me.  Creator
has no checks or balances, no tithes or recompense
for simply sending out our souls to vibrate
each other with care and compassion
so that care and compassion can ripple back
on the ocean of return from the Great Father of it all.

I walk the Good Red Road as I know it.  Sometimes
I am drug along, sometimes a call will lead me onward,
but never am I alone.  A soul afraid of being abandoned
can not see the beauty for eyes that are darting
like sparrows on a wicked wild west wind.  The mouth
can not speak truths for fear of hypocrisy.   My truth
is found in the sweat lodge, in dreams in color,
in the birthing an dying of things that need to live and die.
I am Native American.  Visit my soul on this path
and you can not help but know.

Tags: Native Culture, Poems by Shewolf
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the ones who live in the sky
show their face’s as night approaches
and if you knew why,
then you would understand everything.
they huddle in the reflection,
drinking in the mother light
a wish, suspended on the tongue of belief
that it is enough to mirror her.
closer inspection would show the pits and scars,
scarves draped just so to hide the wounds
where breasts used to be before a slip of surgical knife,
or where slivers of sadness caved them in
as if something was removed and flung free
or calved and set out into a space of their own.
they have no need to apologize nor stand
on some soapbox, spouting off in flare
or simmering in the spit of unfairness.
they will turn their face from you,
if you get close enough to notice
their green incredible light.

Tags: Poems by Shewolf
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In a life with necessary losses, I have left
not once but twice, until I learned the lesson
that we live on borrowed time.

I have seen our elderly suddenly get religion
as if religion were enough to know the Plan,
the god, the man who knew some days do not last.

Fire engulfed the bed sheets, burned a hole in the mattress
like flames would scour my soul, more than once.
Each time I was yanked from that place, unscathed
but changed.  Not a hair on my head burned,
but naked before the Lord.

A bump on the head, a pill, a sudden popping
and a time of deep rest while the soul waited to be unborn.
Moments of awareness and trying to connect too no avail.
A gentle, slow, curling, into myself, and I swooped
and flew to a quiet place where there was no travail.

Having never believed in demons, there were none to frighten me.
Having never believed in wings and things, there was no flutter.
Believing in a new and better place, it was to that place that I came.

A meeting, a “Well done!”, and a choice.
I begged to raise my babies, knowing full well,
this was an ultimate sacrifice.   Such an unnecessary loss.

A sudden resounding insertion of soul and air and blood flow
where every pore wakened after this long sleep.  Pain
was now physical and spiritual.  Knowledge well planted
that time here is but another blink.

I have done all I can do today.  Tomorrow is but another gift.
I could stretch out my hand and reach yesterday,
my father’s hand again, and god’s voice
and know I have done well with all these losses.

Tags: Poems by Shewolf
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Look, sister, the moon rises and someone is weeping.
We know that mourning call, late in the night.
A sorrowed sigh of willows dip their faithful palms
Into the puddle of shadow
Watching the evenings painted beauty
Fall into fitful light of evening.
Golden eddies of sunset are covered
By the shroud of silence that drops
Across the moon.

A woman in a sudden streetlight moment
And she comforts a chorus of caution
That wishes to be cried
And holds it in this waiting game.

It is black, but we are light
And our songs rise above the dark timber
Echoes through the valleys
Where the small and sorrowed curl.

Listen, sister, the moon, our sister
Smiles at us in our turning to tune
The fine knobs of need in the night.

Tags: Letters to My Sisters, Poems by Shewolf
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“Come get lost with me,” she said,
and we girlfully entered the dense forest
of tall trees and tangled plants of the tropics
we had escaped to for our yearly vacation
together, away from the wearying world.
Our hearts in our hands, we left the village common,
and refused to make a mark or leave a scrap
of trail to follow back.  We were familiar
with other jungles, but not this,
not this kind of wildness and danger.
Ours had been the jungle of buildings, roads,
Cities and Boards of Governor’s hot on our trail.
That law of that jungle was enough to inspire us
to run, dropping our city clothes as we flew.
What force or aggression we would meet here
would have nothing but natural laws to it.

“We could die here, “ I said, and gleefully
pounded my feet in a runaway drumbeat
in the language of being free, my hand in hers,
sisters, simply striding away from the places we had known
into the darkness that fell to deepen shadows
that already took on the shape of other monsters
we had known, know to well, and known to leave.
“We have survived worse,” she said
as we gathered the Cohune nuts and wove
palms into a thatch, to cover us, for the night.
We drank our fill of the two-cut vines, and
gathered rocks to pound the shells
to release their seeds.  We could die here, yes,
but not soon, unless we mistake the vine
for Fer-de-Lance or scatter a scorpion’s place of rest,
or dance the Tarantula into a trance.

Glad for our glasses, we focused the sun
on the dried trunk hair and baked our insects
so we would not have to feel them crawl
down our throats and get stuck in our craw. 
“This is no place for a diet,” I said,
scanning the mixes of greens and tree-trunk brown
and the energy the heat sucked from my skin.

We survive.  We are new birds of Paradise.
We danced and we sang, and we let our bellies
push up the sounds of our sorrow and anger
until we were free of it.  Such growls, such roars
had never been heard in this jungle
nor had ever been allowed in that other world.
We carved our initials into a trunk, our idols,
and gave them goddess names.
We knew our enemies well and never crossed
back into that territory again.

If you come to the fringe of an afternoon downpour,
you will hear us, howling like the monkeys,
ecstatic in our tribe of two, old, and graying,
eyes full of bright fruit stare. We are free
mid-life hippies who have escaped from the cage
as a practical means for survival.  My sister and I.

Tags: Letters to My Sisters, Poems by Shewolf
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