HOME | DD

Description
i. it is a time
of big peace

the strangest children
are at play in the neo-prairie
where the second peoples
seeded a native grass
named after the first peoples

no acidic thunderhead
or noxious gale will dull
their small sick body’s scampering
through stretches of wild indigo
& culver’s root

all these fresh souls
have not been on Earth
long enough to know
the hell it has been through

& are most frantically in love
with orb weavers
& parsnip butterflies

these divine children
do not care to distinguish
pollen from pesticides
as if they were
the last honeybees
on Earth

ii. it is a time
of great remembering

all these matriarchs
go binding together society
through communal chatter
& culinary delights prepared
in the fatback of feral swine or
the oil supremely pressed
of black walnuts

they drop spindle fur
plucked from great rodents
which sleep in the hollows
of lichen-crusted culvert pipes
& rear their young in the shelter
of collapsed automobiles

great greasy rodents
whose skins make
everlasting lacings
which the milking mothers
remind the children to tie
in the new way

iii. it is a time
of grand feasting

several men arrive quietly
scented of mammalian guts
& toting raw meat woven
to stalks of bamboo
which they have carried
through crumbling cities
all gobbled by the Cosmos

with a call mixed of whistle
& howl they signal
so many children

to harvest plump seeds
amongst hungry birds
& collect holy water
from heads of wildflowers
& sever the finest fungus
from the belly of the forest
& gather tender sochan
along the timber’s edge

where hawks perched
atop acorn flour-oaks
glean for fallen scraps
& wide-eyed does bed down
with their wobbly babes
in blackberry thorn thickets

afraid to move
yet twitching
all the time

iv. it is a time
of rekindled wisdom

the shaman knows
the creation story goes
everyone rose long ago
from the ashes of machinery

& she knows
over seven hundred songs
with each one also
a plant

& each day at high sun
she sings to the tribe:
the baby & the burial ground are equally sacred

she must sing it
or else the people forget
it is all of them at once
inside the circle
that keeps them sound

v. it is a time
of thriving culture

come evening
they all nest together
tight-bodied beneath
moss-laden hides of omnivores
and herbivores stitched together
in harmony & tanned
with the very brains
they were born with

come morning
they will rise
before the Sun
& worship it

they begin their day
by asking themselves
a question that
remaining unanswered
keeps their culture alive:

is it the sunrise that makes the birds sing
or the birdsong that makes the sun rise?

vi. it is a time
of ecstatic ghosts

the spirits bathe within the morning dew
& seethe from the stones of the forest

sometimes their laughter can be heard
for centuries

they want you to know
that it feels wonderful
to be free & honored
again

gifts
of beaded owl feathers
& chunks of medicinal roots
or a morsel left
of huckleberry pomace
dried in a gleaming bear fat

the spirits are crazy about this place

vii.