Larry Anderson gathered us.
He went through offices and cubicles,
Telling everyone we were going to have a ceremony
For the red pines to be harvested
So we could continue building the thunderbird shape
That housed the college.
Fifteen people joined the circle Dan Jones had us form.
We stood in mid-morning sunlight
In front of the medicine wheel
Between the Center of Excellence doublewide trailer
And the thunderbird’s north wing
As Dan, dark, genial, pipe carrier,
Asked Larry for the bird basket of fruit.
I will not speak the words Dan spoke.
He accepted, then burned tobacco
In the traditional way.
He asked the pines for forgiveness.
He talked about how we were right
In celebrating trees and mourning the need
That caused us to end such long-lived lives.
He asked the trees to bless the lives of students
That would learn in the new building.
The sun was hot.
Dan said his words, teaching us
The proper attitude toward ourselves,
The tall, slender pines.
Then we each ate a raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, or strawberry
As the birchbark basket went round—
Until one kind of each fruit was left.
The birchbark basket and fruit were placed
Beneath high branches of red pine.
Then we went back inside the college to work.
I went away the next morning to Canada
And a gathering of white teepees
Gleaming in a meadow backgrounded
With dark pines, spruce, and white-trunked aspen.
When I returned the red pine
In the roped off plot behind the college,
Extending out from the thunderbird’s north wing, had been cut.
Even stumps were gone.
I looked at the emptiness and said nothing.
He wanders around the grounds,
Rolling like a meadow rolls,
Growling here and there
With the song of who he is
And greeting morning and evening skies
With the power of his presence.
His earth spirit
Speaks languages
Gathered from earth, wind, water, sky.
Walking in sunshine
Between startling whiteness
Of tepees that point poles
Toward a startling blue sky,
He smiles with white teeth
And laughs with a deepness
That shakes aspen leaves
And sets them to dancing
Even though there is no wind.
Note: Trevor Moeke is a Maori leader who is the current Co-Chair of the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium (www.win-hec.org). Makwa, in Anishinabe, means bear. This poem was written on the Shoney Reserve in Canada immediately after the meeting that formed WINHEC.
Twelve hawks soar in a circle,
Each wheeling interlocking into the next.
They soar higher and higher,
Dark wings part of summer blue sky,
Growing smaller as they climb
Above valley grasses,
Pines, and fluttering aspen leaves
Covering sides of hills,
Rising into symphony
Of ever lighter blue distance,
Ever climbing mountains.
Then, in a splinter of light,
Bird wing flashes white.
The world changes
While sky, mountains, trees
Live inside their own sense of time.
On the stage, wooden, outside,
Before a crowd of brown faces,
Maori laughed and sang
A storm of life
And eyes dancing in faces.
In the midst of song and laughter,
A slim, aging man stood in front of the singers.
He spoke of birds wheeling high in the distance of sky.
Note: This happened on the Stoney Reserve in Canada on the day that the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium was formed.
Two long days of writing a constitution
And making the structure of an accreditation authority
And then the long drive from Porirua to Hamilton
Through the Ruahine range of mountains
And the mountains and hills of the Wanganui River.
All through the day we passed from sunshine to storm,
Rain and even hail blowing out of clouds
That crept white and shifting down mountains
Where rows of pines waited for cover
Before they marched in maneuvers
Designed to confuse the eyes of hawks and human beings.
We traveled so long we forgot about the white manes of seahorses
That galloped in heavy winds beneath the ocean
Into the unmoving rocks of shore.
Rainbows walked ahead of us for hours,
Sometimes one, bright in its arching,
And at other times two, the dark one larger than the bright one
And always trailing behind,
A mother watching out for her adventuresome child
That once darted so close to us it made the wet branches of a pine tree shine.
We did not stop at the proceedings at Moutoa Gardens
Where Maori camped in bright colored tents,
Occupying ground in order to assert sovereignty
As old as the naming of the shaky isles by the Aborigine,
But passed gorges plunging to river waters
Below greenness that covered hills and mountains
And fell into valleys blessed by singing birds
That kept trying to tell of the rainbow’s walking glory.
At the Lady of the Waterfall, in the rain,
Mana Forbes blessed the stones we had taken to ourselves
After we climbed down steps to the waterfall
In the country of kings.
Note: After the World Indigenous Higher Education Consortium was founded in Canada, the next step was to begin writing a Constitution, which happened at Kahukura in New Zealand. This poem was written there.
Rock mountains thrown down out of sky
Into the green girdle of pine and spruce
That fall into white trunks of aspen
Fluttering with leaves in the valley
Beside the sometimes molten turquoise of a river.
In this place,
Beside a lake alive with small waves,
Below mountains,
The tall aborigine puts his lips to digeridoo,
Brown hollow log,
And blows out earthsongs
Into humming bones,
His mother’s voice soaring above deepness,
Voices of cultures
From mountains, hills, valleys, ocean shores, forests, swamps, lakes, steppes, deserts
Spilling languages alive
Into the ecology of peoples,
The digeridoo inside heartsong
Of generations backward and forward
From this time, this place.
Words flowed around tables.
Voices became people
As songs sought the spirit
Of prayer, of humility, of hope.
Words and people
Circled inside each other
As agreement approached, a field mouse
Twitching at wind’s breath on blades of grasses.
And then unity,
Past, present, future bound
Into voices and words,
The language of peoples
Become a single language.
Inside the world of cars, airplanes, computers,
People original to places
Feel their deserts, steppes, lakes, swamps, forests, ocean shores, valleys, hills, mountains
Rise from the low color of digeridoo’s sounds.
In education,
In belonging,
In wisdom
Is the sustainability of the world.
Note: This starts a new series of poems, The Tribal College poems, that tell about the tribal college movement in the United States and the formation of the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC). In many ways these poems have historical importance, describing events from some of the most important higher education movements that happened in the latter part of the 20th century.
The Maori came singing in rows,
Language as musical as colors of Hawaiian flowers,
Swaying rhythms weaving through island heat,
Capturing in movement wave song of ocean.
The tribal college people came, led by a hand drum,
Feet moving to the drum’s rhythm,
Spirit inculcated into the history of this moment
Away from the tribal homeland,
Maori homeland,
In the islands of Hawaii.
The singing and drumming met
In a swirl of traditional dress
And words from scores of cultures.
The meeting created waves and tides
And a singing beyond the singing of any one people
Or group of people,
And the waves and tides swept outward
From rocky shores of Hilo, past the reef
Into the ocean of the world
As a growing began
That sent echoes rumbling
Into years and decades in the process of borning.
Hi Yah Hi!
There was a little mouse that I knew
Who was singing to the big blue sky.
“Say little mouse,” I yelled at him there.
“What do you see? A blue sky pie?”
“No,” said the mouse as he sang his song.
“I only see a cloud and the blue,blue air,
But the cloud is as white as the winter snow,
And a sky so blue is rare.”
The final passage of The Dragon Epic by Thomas Davis
The morning sun was shining on the cliffs.
The dragonflies were swarming on the pond.
The surface of the pond seemed like it had
An ever-moving veil upon its face
As tiny multi-colored bodies whirred,
Their wings invisible as bodies’ darted
A dance too intricate to recognize.
Ruarther came out of the woods, two hares
Limp in his hands, a light inside his eyes.
Beside the shed Ruanne stopped feeding chickens
That pecked around her feet and fluttered wings
And looked toward Ruarther with a smile.
“We’ll need the hares!” she called out. “Reestor’s sure
To get here near to dusk and supper time.”
Ruarther’s right arm lifted up a hare.
“I’ll get them ready for the pot,” he said
And walked toward the cottage’s oak door.
Above them, using wings to brake her speed,
Ssruanne flew past the cottage, neck outstretched,
And landed heavily upon the ground
Beside the pond and fleeing dragonflies.
Ruanne flipped up her apron, scattering
The seed into the air, as chickens squawked
And flapped their wings, excited by the food,
And walked toward the golden dragon’s shining.
Ruarther altered course and walked to join
Ruanne as warmly whirling dragon eyes
Looked at the two of them approvingly.
Behind them, from the cottage, Wei ran out
The door and shouted as she ran toward
The three of them, excitement in her voice.
“Ssruanne!” she called. “You’re here! At last you’re here!”
Ruarther dropped his hares upon the ground
As Wei ran up between them, smiling wildly,
And took their hands and skipped toward the dragon,
Her joy impelling them toward the pond.
“A human child needs human care,” Ssruanne
Declared approvingly. She reached out, touched
Her nose to Wei’s small hand, and rumbled joy
Deep down inside her chest, her dragon sense
Of life a wave that rippled out into the day.
Ruarther did not say a word, but reached out, touched
His daughter’s arm, smiled, hugged Ruanne to him,
And felt how lucky he had been to live
Into this moment when he was a human man.
To listen to this passage, click on
Note: This is the fiftieth, and last, passage of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Originally inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on Dragonflies, Dragons and Her Mother’s Death to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to The Long Song Done to read the passage before this one.
She stands inside the garden’s blooming, still
As long green stalks that reach toward the sun.
Above her head the Arcosanti bell,
A gift brought to her by her lovely son,
Waits wind to stir its deep, pure voice to song.
Her graying hair shines in the early morning light:
A silent testament to births and how
Her son died in a place she did not understand
And how her daughters have a boundless grace
And how granddaughters gleam and grandsons spark,
One caught inside autism’s draining clinch—
A binding to the yellows, blues, and pinks
Of blooms she planted in the early spring
Then, whirring, one bold calliope bees
Up to the bright red feeder near her eyes
And slips its slender beak into the hole
Where nectar made inside her kitchen sink
Transmutes into an iridescent energy.
A moment more and clouds of hummingbirds
Kaleidoscope around her head; her eyes
And spirit swirled into a halo born
Of flowers, bell, the hummingbirds, the light
Of early morning, all the life she’s lived.
Ruanne’s, the dragon’s, song gave strength to Wei.
She moved her wings inside the nothingness,
Ignoring wisps of spirits straining past
The place she occupied while still alive.
She felt her father, mother, in the void,
But only saw the swirling spirit ghosts
That danced and disappeared in currents stronger
Than any sense of being in a mind.
As other humans joined the song Ruanne
Sang with the dragons, Wei began to feel
A tide that seemed to have a substance absent
From hurricanes of absent spirits flung
About within the coldness of the void.
She spread her human dragon wings and forced
Herself to move into the feeble tide,
Its current stronger as she moved against
Its force, its substance growing grainier.
The song of life Ruanne had brought alive
Surrounded her and gave increasing strength
Until, at last, she saw them in the grayness,
Her father’s and her mother’s arms alive
With weaving substance out of vapored absence.
The universe was dying in her world.
The sentience inside the trees was shorn
Of time that let them draw their sustenance
From earth and rich, black soils; the beating hearts
Of dragons and of humans boiled their essence
Outside the power of Ruanne’s wild song
Into the nothingness hidden by a veil
Millennia had held until the day
Wei’s mother’s love had reached beyond her grave
And made the weirding storm now powerful
Enough to end all living on the earth.
Wei drew the song life sang into her hearts
And sang her love toward the substance holding
Her mother and her father’s selves together.
The chaos roared inside her ears and self.
It seemed as if the nothingness had gained
A life and hated anyone who threatened
To end the substance it now was inside.
The buffeting of cold assailing Wei
Began to draw her from the doorway where
Her mother wove her spells into the world.
Wei gathered up the song of life and hurled
It, filled with all she was, toward her mother.
Her mother’s form, so ghostly in the void,
Became as solid as the love that tucked
A blanket to her daughter’s chin at night
And let her daughter know the safety knit
Into the certainty of mother’s love.
Her father touched her mother’s arm and shook
His ghostly head and waved toward his daughter.
Receding, Wei saw sadness in her mother’s eyes.
Her mother reached toward the power song
Surrounding Wei, and then the substance built
Inside a place where substance could not be
Began to dissipate into reality.
The dire wolves’ howled beneath the canopy
Of forest where they lived the ravening.
The hearts of dragons thundered as they flew
Above the village smouldering from war.
Wei saw her mother die a second time.
She would not visit as a ghost again.
Inside the dusk of chaos tattering
Into the substance of a normal sky
Grief wailed into Wei’s triple hearts and shivered
Across the snow plains to the mountain peaks.
She felt her wings dissolving in the air.
She did not care, she thought. She did not care.
2
The Old One felt the shift inside the chaos.
She spread her wings and tried to see where Wei
Was in the ending of the weirding storm.
A cleansing, bitter wind was blowing hard
Down from the mountain peaks into village.
She strained her wings into the shrieking wind.
Behind her, Mmirrimann was following.
She saw the rainbow dragon sparking light
Into the darkness scattering away
From where the rainbow bands were shooting out
Across the surface of the wintered earth.
Ssruuanne felt that she might be much too late.
She flew much faster than she’d ever flown.
The rainbow dragon detonated light
Into the darkness as the sky turned blue.
A child fell from the light toward the earth.
Ssruuanne swooped low and grabbed the child
Inside her claws and climbed back to the sky.
Ruanne’s song drifted off into a silence,
Her long chant done; her strength gone from her heart.
Beneath Ssruuanne Wei did not try to move.
She breathed, but did not seem to be alive.
To listen to this passage, click on The Long Song Done.
Note: This is the forty ninth passage of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. There is one more passage after the one to be put on fourwindowspress. Originally inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on Dragonflies, Dragons and Her Mother’s Death to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to Upon the Brink of Destruction to read the passage before this one. The next, and last passage, is at Having Become Human.
