One of those amazing experiences we would never know had our lives followed their originally intended pathways.

*****

Recorded Reading (4:47): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hh9c8l1itqr31rgjmd21i/Grandsons-of-Great-Spirit.mp3?rlkey=x6j2azz4ugm6busaib6owrhti&st=etq8kero&dl=0

*****

Grandsons of Great Spirit

Once again I’d found myself,
For nourishing my mind,
Lagging my society’s
Expectations far behind

For harking to the resonances
Of my inner soul,
For keeping my integrity
And conscience clear and whole,

For being willing for the All
To do my destined part,
For dedicating every
Living moment to my art,

Unable to remain
Where my work had all been done,
My presence just a damper then
On everybody else’s fun,

While to the practice put they
All that I’d helped them to know
Without the creeping feeling
I might say ‘I told you so’

So I awakened, far into
The baby hours of one cold morn,
In a traveling hostel
Ragged, dirty and forlorn

Not too far out of downtown Denver
In the middle winter of
Sans conscious destination
Company and love

I tossed and turned, and turned and tossed
For two hours after I awoke
And then received the inner call
To go outside and have a smoke

And that is how I honored was
To be the awestruck witness of
A show for which could not have paid
For money or for love

Two Indians had drinking been
Okay — Native Americans —
No leather, fur nor feathers
Did their dingy forms enhance

Both blended dim into the night
Cheaply and thinly clad
They struggled to remain erect
And for the purpose had

Appropriated shelter
In a bus stop by the way —
Then on its plexiglass sides they
Commenced their ancient drums to play

And as that rhythm gathered
And rose into the night
I stood unseen in absolutely
Overwhelming sheer delight

I’d seen enough to know
Our poisons had done thorough work
In risks which around every dance
And ritual were made to lurk

Whilst every celebration
Had been made into base mockery
For pale, shrill, shallow tourists
To travel to and see

Until perforce their sacred
Medicine’s practioners
Had recourse to the resource
Which oppressed practice e’er prefers

And learned to sing the songs
And do the dances in the Mind —
Most, generations back, had left
Drum, chant and rattle far behind

Every man and maiden
Except for but a hardcore few
Who traveled to remote locales
The ancient rituals renew

Somewhere in the perhaps
Half century for each man had
Passed since his temporary
Stature as a callow lad

These two Native Americans
— Indians, to me —
Had had the priveledge to one
Of those last ceremonies see

It rose, that rhythm, deepened too,
To thunder from that box they bring,
And when it was sufficient
Those two Men began to sing

Then fell away two hundred years
With all the horror they’d incurred
And this little Caucasian girl
Heard the chanted Native Word

‘Twas to the covert sarcasm of
Modern public powow
As a demon hunting dragon
Is to a domestic sow

That chant came right up from the gut
Those drums brooked no reply
Those shadowed men became wild wraiths
Before my timeless eye

And Present was the Power
Upon which their power call —
And I, by Dispensation,
Was on hand to see it all

*****

This poet presently lives at a fraction of her nation’s poverty level.

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