Native American Songs and Poems Read Online Free Page B

birds attend her . . . loon,
crane, mallard. Turtle stretched,
quakes, rises to surface dark waters
and awaits her passage.
    3
    She filled woods with trilliums, baneberry;
she gave hawk flight, thrush song,
and seeded cedar and sumac.
She flecked her hand in cold waters
and fish came to nibble fingertips.
All about her was wonder.
She brought grains to the fields
and deer to sweet meadows;
she touched maples
and juices ran down the trunks;
she looked back/up and rains
fell . . . she brought surprise.
    All this hergrandsons made,
and the face in the mountain rock,
river currents, deadly nightshade,
forests of elm, tamarack, birch, white pine;
the little spirits and the red people;
wolf and wolverine and bear.
She brought delight . . .
the greenness of things.
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    This her grandsons knew,
the birthed twins . . . Sapling and Flint:
she brought beauty under nourishing sun
and illumination of the moon
and stars over winds blowing
from all directions.
    I’ll look
tonight
for her to fall
again
from among stars
with strawberries
or sweetgrass
held tightly in her hands.

This Is No Movie of Noble Savages
    Adrian C. Louis [PAIUTE]
    Born of trees
whose timeless atoms
carried on their savage
act of indolence
in annual assault of leaves
upon the earth
while their branches
felt up the sky
where the white man’s God lives,
this paper
holding these petroglyphs
is neither apology nor legacy
but a wanted poster.
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    Now, dauntless before Dante’s
nocturnal emissions
of visions of Hell
I curse God and weep
because some creeps crept
through the back window and carried
away my typewriter
while we were at the wake.
When I find them,
they will bleed broken English
from shattered mouths
and my fists
will sing songs of forgiveness,
unless of course
they’re my in-laws.

Evening Near the Hoko River
    Duane Niatum [S‘KLALLAM]
    On the bank of this Klallam river, I am
at rest and fall to earth the way
birch leaves grow small and thin in music.
Like coast wind echoes from the sea,
faces of autumn emerge in orange
and gold and mauve. Crickets spring
moss-lined goodbyes on path,
sandbar and raccoon tracks.
Bear grass trampled down all summer
outshines the illegible animal ancestors
passing through the contrary mirrors of stars
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    Yellow tulips claim there is no other world
than this hill which is as active
as the memory of a lavender field
in another country of the imagination’s,
especially the one I saw in the eye
of a snail, rainbow’s daughter. The cold
dampness of twigs and cones frames
the creatures of metamorphosis,
not the song higher than the osprey gliding
from one current to another above the river.
Desire rises and falls in the air
like the swallows chasing insects into fireweed,
reverses direction and zips through
the canyon, home to seed and wing.
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    The moon in a violet fancy dance,
vagabond in any season, any mood and light,
flings souvenirs to the dream catchers
running for the river, swings a cape
over shoulders as she goes to sleep
in the monolithic hollows of the sea.
The white horses of this beauty
take a step or two or three,
become the river’s hoof beats of the mountain;
from the ruby-throated sky a sparrow
drops from branch to branch
into the heart-line of larch.

Stones Speak of the Earthless Sky
    Duane Niatum
    Memory hasn’t a chord of what the family lost.
For centuries village ancestors potlatched salmon’s
return so we could dance on the water like bugs.
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    Today the stones quit asking not to betray
their ceremonies, our ears deaf to their winter
story of mountain, river, cormorant, red-flowering
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    currant. Our car tracks trample their children
who vanish down the street like moonlight
into gutters, our abbreviated hours.
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    Topaz stones brought us dream circles in order
to never forget where the earth’s heart cracked,
our shadows became ant fodder; we laughed
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    like flies and drank the blood from mirrors.
Flint raised his arm to the