Morning Song The tiny journalist will tell us what she sees. She wants the world to be pink. From her vantage point everything is huge. But don't look down on her. She's bigger than you are. If you stomp on her garden each leaf curls around its own memory. Don't hide what you do. She sees through.
Her treasures, the shiny buttons her grandmother loved. Her cousin, her uncle. There could have been a shirt. The tiny journalist notices each movement on the far away roads. Little puffs of dust find her first. They pretended not to see us. They came at night with weapons. She stares through a hole in the fence, barricade of words and wire.
She feels the rising fire before anyone strikes a match. She has a better idea. Janna At 10, you raise the truth flag. At 11, you raise it even higher. It's right in front of me, I didn't go looking for it. We're living here in the middle of trouble. We were never anyplace else. No reason not to say it straight.
They want to kill us. They do not consider us equal. We are made of bone and flesh and story but they poke their very big guns into our faces and front doors and living rooms as if we are vapor. Why can't they see how beautiful we are? Elementary At the 100 year old National Elk Refuge near Jackson we might ask, How long does an elk live? Who's an old elk here? We'd like to spend time with an elder elk please. Tell us how to balance our lives on this hard edge of human mean, mean temperatures, what we do and don't want to mean. Closing the door to the news will only make you stupid, snapped my friend who wanted everyone to know as much as she did. I'm hiding in old school books with information we never used yet. Before I drove, before I flew, before the principal went to jail.
Sinking my eyes into tall wooden window sashes that lined the light arriving from far reaches, our teachers as shepherds, school a vessel of golden light, you could lift your daily lesson in front of your eyes, stare hard and think, this will take me somewhere. O crops of India, geological formations of Australia, ancient poetries of China, someday we will be aligned in a place of wisdom, together. Red deer, wapiti, running elk rising above yellow meadows at sundown. An elk bows her head. In the company of other elk, an elk feels at home. And we are lost on the horizon now, deeper into the next century than we can even believe, and they will not speak to us. All I Can Do "We have such a beautiful country, but it's not been utilized before for this kind of tourism." --George Rishmawi One hand out against the earth, one hand up against the sky.
Somehow I walk between them. They carry messages through my body, this cord stretched between far places. Some days it's all I can do to stand still and answer you.