When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through
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it will begin to happen.
Set in motion now
set in motion by our witchery
to work for us.
Caves across the ocean
in caves of dark hills
white skin people
like the belly of a fish
covered with hair.
Then they grow away from the earth
then they grow away from the sun
then they grow away from the plants and animals.
They see no life.
When they look
they see only objects.
The world is a dead thing for them
the trees and rivers are not alive
the mountains and stones are not alive.
The deer and the bear are objects.
They see no life.
They fear
they fear the world.
They destroy what they fear.
They fear themselves.
The wind will blow them across the ocean
thousands of them in giant boats
swarming like larva
out of a crushed ant hill.
They will carry objects
which can shoot death
faster than the eye can see.
They will kill the things they fear
all the animals
the people will starve.
They will poison the water
they will spin the water away
and there will be drought
the people will starve.
They will fear what they find.
They will fear the people.
They will kill what they fear.
Entire villages will be wiped out.
They will slaughter whole tribes.
Corpses for us
Blood for us
Killing killing killing killing.
And those they do not kill
will die anyway
at the destruction they see
at the loss
at the loss of the children
the loss will destroy the rest.
Stolen rivers and mountains
the stolen land will eat their hearts
and jerk their mouths from the Mother.
The people will starve.
They will bring terrible diseases
the people have never known.
Entire tribes will die out
covered with festering sores
shitting blood
vomiting blood.
Corpses for our work
Set in motion now
set in motion by our witchery
set in motion
to work for us.
They will take this world from ocean to ocean
they will turn on each other
they will destroy each other
Up here
in these hills
they will find the rocks,
rocks with veins of green and yellow and black.
They will lay the final pattern with these rocks
they will lay it across the world
and explode everything.
Set in motion now
set in motion
To destroy
To kill
Objects to work for us
objects to act for us
Performing the witchery
for suffering
for torment
for the stillborn
the deformed
the sterile
the dead.
Whirling
Whirling
Whirling
Whirling
set into motion now
set into motion.
So the other witches said
“Okay you win; you take the prize,
but what you said just now—
it isn’t so funny
it doesn’t sound so good.
We are doing okay without it
we can get along without that kind of thing.
Take it back.
Call that story back.”
But the witch just shook its head
at the others in their stinking animal skins, fur
and feathers.
It’s already turned loose.
It’s already coming.
It can’t be called back.
JANICE GOULD (1949–2019), Koyongk’awi Maidu, was a poet and scholar born in San Diego and raised in Berkeley, California. She earned her PhD in English at the University of New Mexico and published five books of poetry: Beneath My Heart, Earthquake Weather, Doubters and Dreamers, The Force of Gratitude, and Seed. She was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Astraea Foundation, and the Roothbert Fund, as well as a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship. The Pikes Peak poet laureate from 2014 to 2016, Gould taught Women’s and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She was an accomplished musician, playing and performing folk, classical, Flamenco, and blues, and a teacher and practitioner of Aikido Koshin Shuri.
Earthquake Weather
It’s earthquake weather in California,
that hazy stillness along the coast
just before the Santa Anas howl
out of the east, hot and dry.
There were days in September when we drove
down the fault line south of Hayward.
We went where there were Spanish names:
Suñol and Calaveras,
la Misión de San José.
I remember seeing the cells of the padres,
their faded vestments,
the implements of wood and iron.
We were looking for another country,
something not North America:
a taste, a smell, a solitary image—
the eucalyptus on a bleached hill.
Its blue pungent leaves made you long
for another home.
That was what you wanted from me—
to be your other home,
your other country.
Being Indian, I was your cholo
from the Bolivian highlands.
I was your boy, full of stone
and a cold sunset.
At night, seated at your bedside,
I was remote. I often made you weep—
you in the guise of an angelita.
You lay on the low mattress,
a weaving beneath your head,
and watched me with your slow eyes,
your sadness.
When September comes with its hot,
electric winds,
I will think of you and know
somewhere in the world
the earth is breaking open.
ANITA ENDREZZE (1952–), Yaqui, graduated from Eastern Washington University with an MA in creative writing and has published several poetry and short story collections, including At the Helm of Twilight; Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon; The Humming of Stars and Bees and Waves: Poems and Short Stories; Butterfly Moon; and Enigma. Her paintings have been featured on the covers of books as well as in exhibitions around the world.
The Wall
Build a wall of saguaros,
butterflies, and bones
of those who perished
in the desert. A wall of worn shoes,
dry water bottles, poinsettias.
Construct it of gilded or crazy house
mirrors so some can see their true faces.
Build a wall of revolving doors
or revolutionary abuelas.
Make it as high as the sun, strong as tequila.
Boulders of sugar skulls. Adobe or ghosts.
A Lego wall or bubble wrap. A wall of hands
holding hands, hair braided from one woman
to another, one country to another.
A wall made of Berlin. A wall made for tunneling.
A beautiful wall of taco trucks.
A wall of silent stars and migratory songs.
This wall of solar panels
and holy light,
panels of compressed cheetos,
topped not by barbed wire but sprouting
avocado seeds, those Aztec testicles.
A wall to keep Us in and Them out.
It will have faces and heartbeats.
Dreams will be terrorists. The Wall will divide
towns, homes, mountains,
the sky that airplanes fly through
with their potential illegals.
Our wallets will be on life support
to pay for it. Let it be built
of guacamole so we can have a bigly block party.
Mortar it with xocoatl, chocolate. Build it from coyote howls
and wild horses drumming across the plains of Texas,
from the memories
of hummingbird warriors and healers.
Stack it thick as blood, which has mingled
for centuries, la vida. Dig the foundation deep.
Create a 2,000 mile altar, lit with votive candles
for those who have crossed over
defending freedom under spangled stars
and drape it with rebozos,
and sweet grass.
Make it from two-way windows:
the wind will interrogate us,
the rivers will judge us, for they know how to separate
and divide to become whole.
Pink Floyd will inaugurate it.
Ex-Presidente Fox will give it the middle finger salute.
Wiley Coyote will run headlong into it,
and survive long after history forgets us.
Bees will find sand-scoured holes and fill it
with honey. Heroin will cover it in blood.
But it will be a beautiful wall. A huge wall.
Remember to put a rose-strewn doorway in Nogales
where my grandmother crossed over,
pistols on her hips. Make it a gallery of graffiti art,
a refuge for tumbleweeds,
a border of stories we already know by heart.
OFELIA ZEPEDA (1952–), Tohono O’odham, earned her PhD from the University of Arizona, where she was named a Regents’ Professor in 2007 and has been a professor of linguistics. Her book A Papago Grammar is the only pedagogical text about the Tohono O’odham language. She has published several collections of poetry, including Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert, Jewed ‘I-Hoi/Earth Movements, and Where Clouds are Formed. Zepeda is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship as well as an Endangered Language Fund grant. She is currently the head of the American Indian Studies department at the University of Arizona.
Bury Me with a Band
My mother used to say, “Bury me with a band,”
and I’d say, “I don’t think the grave will be big enough.”
Instead, we buried her with creosote bushes,
and a few worldly belongings.
The creosote is for brushing her footprints away as she leaves.
It is for keeping the earth away from her sacred remains.
It is for leaving the smell of the desert with her,
to remind her of home one last time.
Ocean Power
Words cannot speak your power.
Words cannot speak your beauty.
Grown men with dry fear in their throats
watch the water come closer and closer.
Their driver tells them, “It’s just the ocean,
it won’t get you, watch it, it will roll away again.”
Men who had never seen the ocean
it was hard not to have the fear that sits in the pit of the stomach.
Why did they bring us this way?
Other times we crossed on the desert floor.
That land of hot dry air
where the sky ends at the mountains.
That land that we know.
That land where the ocean has not touched for thousands of years.
We do not belong here,
this place with the sky too endless.
This place with the water too endless.
This place with air too thick and heavy to breathe.
This place with the roll and roar of thunder always playing to your ears.
We are not ready to be here.
We are not prepared in the old way.
We have no medicine.
We have not sat and had our minds walk through the image
of coming to this ocean.
We are not ready.
We have not put our minds to what it is we want to give to the ocean.
We do not have cornmeal, feathers, nor do we have songs and prayers ready.
We have not thought what gift we will ask from the ocean.
Should we ask to be song chasers
Should we ask to be rainmakers
Should we ask to be good runners
or should we ask to be heartbreakers.
No, we are not ready to be here at this ocean.
LAURA TOHE (1952–), Diné, is Tsénahabiłnii, Sleepy Rock People clan, and born for the Tódich’inii, Bitter Water clan. She received a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska. A scholar, writer, poet, and librettist, and the daughter of a code talker, Tohe’s books include No Parole Today, Tséyi’/Deep in the Rock: Reflections on Canyon de Chelly, and Code Talker Stories. She is professor emerita of English at Arizona State University and was named poet laureate of the Navajo Nation for 2015–2017.
When the Moon Died
Peter MacDonald, former President of the Diné Nation, was convicted of various illegal activities and is now serving a prison sentence.
When the moon died
we watched in silent awe
the closing of her light
above the treetops.
My father’s voice comes back to me:
“It’s a bad sign for us
when it happens at night.
It hasn’t rained here,”
and we look eastward
at the thirsty earth,
the sun bearing down
on the cracks in the ground.
“We must not be living right.”
The neighbor brought out a
camera and aimed it
at the moon.
Minutes later only a
blurred image emerged.
“If it happens during the day,
it’s bad for the white people.
Years ago the flu killed a lot
of them.
It was bad.”
I returned to the typewriter while
the moon hid herself
as if in shame.
“They say you’re not supposed
to do anything,
don’t go to bed,
don’t eat. Pregnant
women shouldn’t see it.
Three people shot because of
MacDonald.
We’re not living right.”
When the moon died
she reminded us of
the earth ripping apart
violent tremors,
greasy oceans,
the panic of steel winds,
whipping shorelines and
thirsty fields.
Grandfather trees pulled
for profit.
The Earth is angry at the people.
We’re not living right.
No Parole Today
In 1980 prisoners rioted in the Santa Fe State Prison. After several days of violence and bloodshed, the prison was retaken by authorities.
A shadow of smoke passed
over my dreams
I awoke trying to remember what was said
about Santa Fe and prison
the blood and emotions spilling over
I dressed and poured a cup of coffee
then I remembered
my own scars
lying on bunk beds
and listening to
floor polishers whirling
and the bell that drove me
to sneaking behind
cars and freeways
I swore then I would never
scrub no more walls
and porches at midnight
not for the woman
who sits sideways in auditorium chairs
and steals bacon from the back door
as easily as she could steal your confidence
I’m not from here
no more rubber meat and showering on cement floors
I learned early that my life
was separated by walls
and roll calls
Last night they said
a thousand men uncapped themselves behind barbed wire and smoke
LUCI TAPAHONSO (1953–), Diné, is a professor emerita of English literature at the University of New Mexico. Her books include A Breeze Swept Through; Blue Horses Rush In; Sáanii Dahataał: The Women Are Singing; A Radiant Curve, and several children’s books. She was the recipient of a Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship. She was the first poet laureate of the Navajo Nation.
Blue Horses Rush In
For Chamisa Bah Edmo, Shisóí’ alą́ąji’ naaghígíí
Before her birth, she moved and pushed inside her mother.
Her heart pounded quickly and we recognized
the sound of horses running:
the thundering of hooves on the desert floor.
Her mother clenches her fists and gasps.
She moans ageless pain and pushes: This is it!
Chamisa slips out, glistening wet, and takes her first breath.
The wind swirls small leaves
and branches in the dark.
Her father’s eyes are wet with gratitude.
He prays and watches both mother and baby—stunned.
This baby arrived amid a herd of horses,
horses of different colors.
White horses ride in on the breath of the wind.
White horses from the east
where plants of golden chamisa shimmer in the moonlight.
She arrived amid a herd of horses.
Blue horses enter from the south
bringing the scent of prairie grasses
from the small hills outside.
She arrived amid a herd of horses.