6/2/04
Carrie Billy just sent me a lost poem from the past, which is below. She is moving to Navajo Tech to take up a job that I absolutely loved, Provost. I am so looking forward to when she arrives on campus. In the meantime, she has been packing and trying to decide what to do with tons of stuff accumulated over decades of living in DC.
Al Kuslikis is something of a packrat, she tells me, and the two of them found the following poem in my scrawled handwriting in the stuff he had at the DC house. Al is a wonderful friend, and I think I scrawled this out at a bar while Al had one of his usual beers that is next to Union Station in DC, although my memory can’t be trusted fully.
For years I wrote poems on napkins, or scratch paper, and on anything handy while I was with people from the early years of the tribal college movement and then handed one of the people with me what I had just written. In my book, Meditations on Ceremonies of Beginnings, published by Tribal College Press https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GD88R99R?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback, I describe how Marjane Ambler, the former Editor of the Tribal College Journal, found out what I was doing, yelled at me in a crowded Irish DC restaurant, and then made me promise to make sure I told everyone I gave a poem to that they were to send her a copy. The copies she collected over the years became Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings.
Of course, several of the poems (who knows how many) were not saved, and I kept on writing the poems over the years and giving them away.
This is one of those poems that happened that has long been lost, though Carrie and Al have now rescued it:
When you throw a stone into a pond
And see concentric circles flowing outward in the water,
You see the conversation that has occurred
Between the stone and water.
I listen,
The voices of humans in the evening waft into air,
Eventually being absorbed by the earth’s great silence.
I listen
And hear how human voices are absorbed into sounds
Made by crickets, stones, water, sky.
I listen
And try to find the center of the universe, meaning.
In the deep woods a frog croaks.
I see an elder, an Indian man, dancing,
Alone in the early spring,
A full moon broken by the dark trunks of white pine,
Dancing,
Trying to bring balance back into the world.
