Besaydoo
YALIE KAMARA

Source: The Adroit Journal

What blessings do you give at departure?
Long distance phone conversations
Misheard words, misheard lyrics
Ravages of time, distance, and circumstance
Being apart from a loved one

Too newborn pure
​Pull apart like string cheese
Code words
Secret language with friends

​Blessings
JAY PARINI
 
Blessings for these things:
the dandelion greens I picked in summer
and would douse with vinegar and oil
at grandma’s little house in Pennsylvania,
near the river. Or the small potatoes
she would spade to boil and butter,
which I ate like fruit with greasy fingers.

Blessings for my friend, thirteen
that summer when we prayed by diving from a cliff
on Sunday mornings in the church
of mud and pebbles, foam and moss.
I will not forget the fizz and tingle,
sunning in wet skin on flat, cool rocks,
so drenched in summer.

And for you, my love, blessings
for the times we lay so naked in a bed
without the sense of turbulence or tides.
I could just believe the softness of our skin,
those sheets like clouds,
how when the sunlight turned to roses,
neither of us dared to move or breathe.

Blessings on these things and more:
the rivers and the houses full of light,
the bitter weeds that taste like sun,
dirt-sweetened spuds,
the hard bright pebbles, spongy mosses,
lifting of our bodies into whiffs of cloud,
all sleep-warm pillows in the break of dawn.

Source: ​poets.org

• For ten minutes, write your own “blessings” poem or gratitude list poem
• Write your own “blessings” poem
• Church of . . . ?
• What is our church made of?

​

CNN reported 2020 presidential Election exit polls by race, referring to the Native population as "something else."  Native commentary delivered a thorough "roasting" via twitter and memes, highlighting anger with the continued marginalization of Native peoples.  And some had fun with the multiple meanings of "something else." 

​Below is Rainy Dawn Ortiz's poetic response.

More Than Something Else
RAINY DAWN ORTIZ                                                

​Something Else.
Some one else
Some where else

That place is here,
In my home,
We are here.

I am brown,
Brown hair,
Brown eyes,
Like cookies Feather tells me, and I like to think it’s perfectly
cooked Pueblo cookies.

My kids are something else,
9 different shades of brown,
All beautiful.

My grandkids are something else,
4 brown eyes, 2 blue eyes,
All Native,
Definitely something else, as I watch them be rowdy, be loving,
be here in this world.

We are here
On this earth
In this time and place

In our homes,
On our lands,
In the cities,
With our families, laughing loudly, cooking together, protecting
each other.

We are something else
With our songs
Our dances.

We pray with corn meal,
Eagle feathers,
Medicine bundles,
Burn some sage, make sure to acknowledge the four directions,
as the sun comes up.

We are the something else,
Who were here,
To greet Christopher Columbus

We were born from
This earth,
Crawled out of the center,
Of our mother’s womb, we are important, we are strong.

We are something else,
We are Pueblo people, Plains people, Forest People, Desert
people, Nomadic people, Cliff dwellers, Ocean fishers, Lake and
river fishers, hunters, medicine collectors, horse riders, artists,
speakers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, we are human beings.
We are something else,
We are Native People,
Indigenous to this land.
We are a proud,
Something else.

​Source: Academy of American Poets
​

Grace                                                
JOY HARJO
                                    For Darlene Wind and James Welch
I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn't stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. 

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. 
​
I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn't; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it. 

Source: Academy of American Poets at poets.org

cheap apartment walls
the wind and her wild ways
picking yourself up
the [memory of the] dispossessed
what went down slow as honey
having nothing to lose and losing it anyway
whether or not you deserve grace
imaginary frozen buffalo

Unlike objects, two stories can occupy the same space
CHARLES PEEK
 
Out along the last curve in the brick walk
the grass has begun to green,
with the freezing cold and coming snow
its certain fate.
 
The cranes make the same mistake,
fields of red capped heads attest their arrival
just before the worst blizzard of winter
makes it impossible to tell the field from the river.
 
And we, too, have known these mortal mishaps,
miscalculated our time, found ourselves out of step,
arriving too early, staying on too late,
misjudging the nearness, the vengeance of the storm.
 
The cranes, the grass, they tell us:
this can go on for millions of years.

Source: poetryfoundation.org

mortal mishaps
miscalculating time
being out of step
arriving too early staying on too
​     late
​this can go on for millions of years
         .

misjudging the nearness
misjudging the vengeance of ​
red capped heads attesting arrival
if you can pull someone back
​the vengeance of a storm

November
AMY LOWELL
 
The vine leaves against the brick walls of my house,
Are rusty and broken.
Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees,
The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes
Sweep against the stars.
And I sit under a lamp
Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart.
Even the cat will not stay with me,
But prefers the rain
Under the meagre shelter of a cellar window.

a sense of place
storms
if things had been different
rootedness
this is my landscape
fantasyland
​river in the ceiling

Dictionary of Owl
BY MARY MERIAM
 
Who cares about the redbud tree, its flowers
half-black, half-pink, from winter’s April freeze;
who cares who lives halfway or dies too soon,
the blue jay’s baby squirming on bare ground,
the agonies of blood, the frigid breeze
shaking the fragile sense of April showers;
who cares who craves the heated pools of June,
the lake of boaters buzzing by or drowned.
Two vultures meet me at my open door,
scanning for carrion, the stink of spasms,
the sky-gods pecking rotting flesh for food;
who cares if this strange order ends in good,
or if the chickadee lands in the chasms
of endless carelessness forevermore.

​​Source: Poetry Foundation

who cares?
scavenger
what do you care about?
fragile sense
desperation
a dictionary of _____
the vultures
endless carelessness

definition of sounds
death and life
open seas
two vultures
carrion
birds, just birds

Ready. Set. Write a poem for 10 minutes!

Snake
KATIE PETERSON
​
The thunderstorm came like a pot boiling over and the color
of water was made by that, all of a sudden, a pigment
more tropical than dense with the reflection of light.
Everywhere the scent of at least five different kinds of plants
lifted up. The desert can’t talk back but I believe
it breathes instead, breathes vivid when the water
wants it the water can’t wait and it breathes back.
I turned and went into the house.
Under the dining room table, a snake.
Green with a yellow stripe bisecting its back.
Motion ate each centimeter of floor
and air, scared, it makes sense to say, though there
exists or existed no safer time ever in which that shape
wouldn’t want to move, dead August being the exception
to this when heat makes molasses of all of us.
Why did I want to chase it out? I did, I got a rake and kept
making it make that beautiful scared
shape upon the floor, so clean.
Like two ice cubes rubbing each other
and too cold to melt. Nothing organized that fear.
Seeing the edges it found its way out.