Before getting my license to drive commercially, I worked a couple years in an Amazon warehouse picking orders. It’s a controlled chaos system intended to utilize every bit of available space, so it feels like a scavenger hunt with a scanner gun.
On one of these many searches, I found a sobriety coin engraved with a serenity prayer for Native Americans who struggle with alcohol. I thought the message in the inscription was beautiful:
Great Spirit whose voice I hear in the wind,
whose breath gives life to the world,
hear me.
I come to you as one of your many children.
I am small and weak.
I need your strength and wisdom.
May I walk in beauty. [Punctuation added]
In the Fire of This Water
When I drink,
I dream myself
into the stories
of my great-grandfather,
where our people were free,
living on sacred land,
from the river on across the mesa,
and under the flame of these waters
I am brave,
I am strong,
I can stare
red-eyed into the face of the buffalo,
stubbornly snorting
the hot breath it expels
as it grunts and turns away.
When I drink,
this reservation life
is but a bad dream fading away,
these discarded scraps of land
disappear like the dust they are
and I can see again through his eyes
the land of the Dine’,
people with their heads up.
When I drink,
they say I call out angrily
to the Great Spirit,
they say I dance up a storm,
flashing and
bellowing with thunder
at the stumbling of our people
until I also fall,
until I too tumble,
unstable with drink.
When I wake,
all is still broken,
all is still dust and sadness,
ashes of a once proud flight
sun-baked into the faces
of our wandering children,
yet all I can think of
is that next drink,
my next visit with forefathers
long gone silent
and the dream
dispersed to the wind,
trying to capture it again
in the fire of this water.
_______________
An earlier version of this piece was published in the Tipton Poetry Journal #41.
| Copyright © 2021 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there. |
How serendipitous / synchronistic that your column today follows (unplanned by us) immediately on Bob’s “History’s Rhymes” (and Roger’s comment on it)….
ReplyDeleteWhat incredible empathy you must have. For, or from, something as seemingly insignificant as that you create a life, a universe, you make the reader FEEL like that Indian (that's what all the many native Americans I know call themselves). Good art elicits emotion, and this doesn't disappoint.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Roger! Sometimes the character building skills I intended to use writing great novels create a universe in my head that allows me to live a few moments of life in other bodies.
ReplyDeleteI understand completely. I identify with all my characters in one way or another. They live to me, and I never forget them, like real friends.
ReplyDelete