There are words in your eyes, and love lens that reads them
scrolling our sky, grandfather, taking in the breath of trees
and exhaling stories that spread out over the world
like colorful songs, like hum and strum of a western guitar
brought up on Country music of the fifties… and drums.
Your cowboy hat keeps the shade on your brow
and blue jeans sit better on rough stones these days
when your diamond willow cane lends you lift up and drop down
of bones bathed in a thousand thousand streams carrying tears
of many spirit keepers who have watched our people stumble
through barbed wires fences while on their quests.
It’s not hard to know a pretender from the passionate.
You have no time, old man, for red hawk talk on borrowed crystals
as if keeping a stagnant stone without polishing its spirit
gives the holder any power. A blade of grass tucked in the side
of your mouth means more. If it does not hang
in the skin of a brother, over the heart, at the throat of a voice
of a man, or woman, and is listened too, it is of no use to anyone.
It can not whisper secrets it needs to whisper, uncradled
in the cavern womb of sweat or ceremony. Those who tell you,
stranger, foe; we never know, without seeing first, you pour sweat
from the pain of cedar splash, is offering feasts to pigs in the barnyard.
This you told me, while I sat at your knee and learned shape-shifting
for disguise’s sake so the panderer would not prosper from ancient stories.
Only a tribeless man or woman would gather contestants of spirit.
You, grandfather, are a tribe of your own, but we come to you,
not you to us, nor did you send for us to gather friends, like followers
to make you feel important in your powerlessness. I know you, Old Man,
by the spirit that called me; ancient spirit, one that was not written
for other bands and other lands but for me. For me, you speak bear
language, red willow words, phrases medicine of my own people.
Come, Ageless One, tell me the true secret, that is not for the hopeless
nor given in snake oil packaging with New Age psychobabble.
I need the truth your hand draws in the air, and the words drawn
in on sacred breath of the pipe and the herbs humming in the fire pit.
Tell me in spirit-voices, how came you to me, with Love
that is spirit help, not self-help. I am a child at your denim knees
wading into the dream you speak of so passionately. Protect me
from the likes of those who would confound me for their own prosperity.
Tags: Native Culture, Poems by Shewolf
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