Earth
Dug up
Pounded
Rounded
Painted
Fired
Into pots
Shards now
Broken
Jagged pieces of the past
In my soft hand
History demanding its voice
Something primal wanting witness
Steeped in speculative silence
I’m not here to rhapsodize about First People
(though I may slip into song)
I’m not here to romanticize them
(though I may defer to poetry)
Their lives were austere
Though the desert abundant
In those days when the shards were whole
The blue ribbon of river ran
And the coyotes with it
Quail coveys – a hundred Gambels and more
Bursts as exultations from the grasses
Big horn sheep were allowed their majesty
In those days
Herds of white-tail deer
Stepped as wary dancers
Through shadowed arroyos
Both prey and prayer
In those days
First people lay within the embrace of stars
And were reverent
Existed part of but not apart from
The connective tissue of being
Stood on this bluff
Looked out over the fragile waters
And knew everything that was important
That the desert gave them all they needed
Which was all they wanted
So it’s been said
But why only pots and not wheels
Why only wickiups and mud dwellings
Not cathedrals
Why live at the bone
Wisdom
Symbiosis
And what is the cost of our
21st century insulations
(air-conditioned indulgences)
The toxic engines of our prosperity
Our Posturepedic lives
What will we leave behind
Our own radioactive shards
Permanent scars, poisons and plastics
Heavy tread marks
Where nothing good can grow
Indigenous people walked lightly
Stepped over and around
Not through
They became the landscape
We destroy it
The river’s dead now
Rabbits scarce as the Peoples’ reverence
The stars obliterated
All that remain are ancient voices
whispers in the wind
And earthen shards
Broken pots
Broken like our faith with
The nature of things
Broken like the mountains
And hills and valleys
Broken and damned like our rivers
Like the very earth
From which First People pulled the clay
With which they pounded
And rounded and painted and fired
And left behind as
Shattered testimony
But to what
First People’s abject existence
Their sparse lives in harmony
With the whole of being
Weighed against
Our elaborate presence
Discordant progress
I stand where First People stood
My hand full of inconclusive evidence
And listen for an answer
And hear the mourning dove
Instead.
—
Gavin Kayner’s plays, poems and prose have won numerous awards and appeared in a variety of publications.
