Native American Songs and Poems Read Online Free PDF Page A

hummingbird’s
fragrances, healing our eyes, spiky as sea urchins.
    Â 
    We ground Flint to a machine that exploded
with roadkill floating in toxins.
From a cave, ancestor stones gave us the cells
    Â 
    of trout, madrona, butterfly, eagle and grizzly,
gave us our birth song born of the sea,
gave us eagle feathers for the sunrise dance.
    Â 
    We chose instead to shoot the spotted-owl
from its borderless clarity,
turn off life like a video, including ours.

After Lightning
    Simon J. Ortiz [ACOMA PUEBLO]
    For all we know, we could be
already crystal motes, shattered
by swift and quick surging light.
We would never be certain if we
had a chance at all,
    only settled
    a vast moment later into dim shadow,
gradually blending into the prairie,
the low hills, the horizon ours now.
    Â 
    The moment before always too late.

Skins as Old Testament
    Carter Revard [OSAGE]
    Wonder who first slid in
to use another creature’s skin
for staying warm—like bloody violation,
a heresy almost,
to crawl inside the deer’s
still-vivid presence there,
to take their lives from what had moved
within, to eat delicious life
then spread its likeness over a sleeping
and breathing self, musk-wrapped
inside the wind,
the rain,
the sleet—
to roll up in a seal-skin self beneath
a walrus heaven
on which the sleet would rap and tap,
to feel both feet
grow warm even on ice
or in the snow—they must have thought
the flame from tallow was like
such warmth from fur and hide—
it must have been some kind
of revelation when the life
came back into a freezing hand or foot
after the fur went round its bareness, even more
when human bodies coupling in
a bear’s dark fur
found winter’s warmth and then
its child
within the woman
came alive.

What the Eagle Fan Says
    Carter Revard
    For the Voelkers, who gave the feathers; for the Besses, who beaded them into the fan; and for all the Gourd Dancers.
    Â 
    I strung dazzling thrones of thunder beings
on a spiraling thread of spinning flight,
beading dawn’s blood and blue of noon
to the gold and dark of day’s leaving,
circling with Sun the soaring heaven
over turquoise eyes of Earth below,
her silver veins, her sable fur,
heard human relatives hunting below
calling me down, crying their need
that I bring them closer to Wakonda’s ways, 19
and I turned from heaven to help them then.
When the bullet came, it caught my heart,
the hunter’s hands gave earth its blood,
loosed our light beings, let us float
toward the sacred center of song in the drum,
but fixed us first firm in tree-heart
that green light-dancers gave to men’s knives,
ash-heart in hiding where deer-heart had beat,
and a one-eyed serpent with silver-straight head
strung tiny rattles around white softness
in beaded harmonies of blue and red—
lightly I move now in a man’s left hand,
above dancing feet follow the sun
around old songs soaring toward heaven
on human breath, and I help them rise.

Durable Breath
    John Smelcer [CHEROKEE/ AHTNA] for Peter Kalifornsky
    Outside my cabin window
I hear Raven’s muffled caw rise from the river.
    Â 
    A lamp burns low upon my table,
the air is still in the silence of the room.
    Â 
    I think often of that night in your trailer at Nikiski,
of the old stories you shared with me—
    Â 
    Dena‘ina Suk’dua
“That which is written on the people’s tongues.”
    Â 
    As a child you were beaten with a stick
for speaking your native tongue. My father,
    Â 
    born at Indian River,
does not know his mother’s language.
    Â 
    Tonight, Kenaitze Indians gather
at a Russian Orthodox Church
    Â 
    to mourn in altered syllables among white-washed
crosses and tarnished silver ikons.
    Â 
    As I lean toward darkness,
it is your voice that lifts
    Â 
    Raven’s wings above the riverbank,
his ancient syllables rising like an ochre tide.

To Those Who Matter
    Roberta Hill Whiteman [ONEIDA] for the Oneida speakers and teachers
    The sunlight