Native American Songs and Poems Read Online Free Page A

sleep,
after the forgotten voyages of his own dreaming,
the forgotten clay of his beginnings,
after nakedness and fear of something larger,
these he named; wolf, bear, other
as if they had not been there
before his words, had not
had other tongues and powers
or sung themselves into life
before him.
    Â 
    These he sent crawling into wilderness
he could not enter,
swimming into untamed water.
He could hear their voices at night
and tracks and breathing
at the fierce edge of forest
where all things know the names for themselves
and no man speaks them
or takes away their tongue.
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    His children would call us pigs.
I am a pig,
the child of pigs,
wild in this land
of their leavings,
drinking from water that burns
at the edge of a savage country
of law and order.
I am naked, I am old
before the speaking,
before any Adam’s forgotten dream,
and there are no edges to the names,
no beginning, no end.
From somewhere I can’t speak or tell,
my stolen powers
hold out their hands
and sing me through.

The Origins of Corn
    Linda Hogan
    This is the female corn.
This is the male.
These are the wild skirts flying
and here is the sweet dark daughter
that passed between those
who were currents of each other’s love.
She sleeps
in milky sweetness. She is the stranger
that comes from a remote land, another time
where sky and earth are lovers always
for the first time each day,
where crops begin to stand
amid brown dry husks, to rise straight
and certain as old people with yellowed hair
who carry medicines,
the corn song,
the hot barefoot dance
that burns your feet
but you can’t stop
trading gifts
with the land,
putting your love in the ground
so that after the long sleep of seeds
all things will grow
and the plants who climb into this world
will find it green and alive.

In the Cornfield
    Rex Lee Jim [NAVAJO]
    suddenly
three persons come upon an old man
hoeing with a digging stick
in the middle of the wide cornfield.
quickly
he asks, who are you?
promptly
one of the three persons answers, I am me, who else?
the old man
slowly, but surely lifts his strawhat,
wipes the sweat off his forehead
on the back of his left hand.
and he looks at the young bilagaana man
with his wife behind him who is swollen with a child.
the old man’s answer comes bursting forth
through the bulging stomach, and the woman feels
each kicking foot stretching her pain.
you say you are you, but I say, you are not here yet.
although you stand before me, I only see
your father your mother your grandmother your grandfather.
the sun catches the Navajo grin in action.
see that stomach, the old man teases,
“that one is mine.”
I don’t translate that, and he continues,
you are still there, there in the stomach.
I won’t see you for a long time.
he looks up at the sun and then
his eyes scan his wide cornfield.
I am there, dancing in the breeze.
and just then cornstalks whistle in the breeze.
and out of the dancing stalks rides a young Navajo man,
riding a buckskin, wrangler jeans polishing
an already hard worn saddle,
a silver buckle flashing in the sun, with its
oval turquoise imitating the sky.
he strides off the horse and says,
I brought lunch for you, my father.
and the old man bellows with joy and delves into his food.

Sky Woman
    Maurice Kenny [MOHAWK]
    In the night
I see her fall
sometimes
clutching vines
of ripe strawberries,
sometimes sweetgrass,
other times
seeds
which will sprout.
Always
loon or crane
fly with her.
    1
    I imagine her standing
by the cauldron stirring,
her naked flesh spattered
by bubbling corn mush.
Dogs come from the dark,
wolves, to lick her flesh.
Blood runs from wounds
the dogs have made
with their sharp tongues
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    She will mother me
for generations.
Her endurance ensures mine.
    2
    He pulled a great tree by its roots
from the sky earth
and left a gaping hole showing
the dark. Waters rumbled.
She was enticed to look deep
into the hole. She clutched
her abdomen, the child she carried,
and falls . . .
Water