Dawisgala
I've sent to my two older grandsons two thousand year-old arrowheads and this poem. I want them to have something tangible of the Native American heritage we share, and though it is a small part it has become more and more part of me as I've grown older, as I hope it will be for them.
DAWISGALA
because I think our story should not end -
or go on in the dark with nobody listening.
William Stafford
The Cherokee word for arrowhead . . .
Take the tool you made of the deer's antler
And hold it hard against the cleft and ridge
Of flint fault, leaning with all your strength
Opposing it, the flakes opening and falling,
And wherever you touch it the sharp edges
Shape a story told across a thousand years.
Some remembering is not from any memory
But echoes of the wind in the prairie grass
Still singing in the blood. I know this song
But not how to flake sounds from the stone
Of my tongue to shape the old words again.
Still, I hear them, and someone saying here,
Just a little deeper into the darkening woods.
Poetry by countryfog
Read 646 times
Written on 2015-04-18 at 16:25
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