bang-a-rang

And if a few strangers thought me crazy
For writing poetry, aloud, in public,
Like just another homeless schizophrenic,
Then fuck them for wanting clarity
And fuck them for fearing mystery.

from the poem, Mystery Train, from the collection of poems, Face, by Sherman Alexie

Beloved

After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently.  The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down.  The she shouted, “Let the children come!” and they ran from the trees towards her.

“Let your mothers hear you laugh,” she told them, and the woods rang.  The adults looked on and could not help smiling.

Then “Let the grown men come,” she shouted.  They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees. “Let your wives and your children see you dance,” she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.

Finally she called the women to her.  ”Cry,” she told them.  ”For the living and for the dead.  Just cry.”  And without covering their eyes the women let loose.

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up.  Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and grasping for breath.  In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

Looking Glass by Sherman Alexie, from War Dances

On October 5, 1877, in Idaho’s Bear Paw Mountains, the starved and exhausted Nez Perce ended thier two-thousand-mile flight and surrendered to general Oliver Howard and his Ninth Cavalry.  When the legendary Nez Perce leader, Chief Joseph, stood and said, “My heart is sick

And
Sad.
From
Where
The
Sun
Now
Stands,

I
Will
Fight
No
More
Forever”

he thought they were his final words.  He had no idea that he would live for another twenty-seven years.  First he watched hundreds of his people die in exile in Oklahoma.  Then Joseph and his fellow survivors were allowed to move back to the Pacific Northwest but were forced to live on the Colville Indian Reservation, hundreds of miles away from their tribe’s ancesteral home in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley.  Exiled twice, Joseph still led his tribe into the twentieth century, though he eventually died of deperssion.  But my grandmother, who was born on the Colville Indian Reservation, always said she remembered Joseph as a kind and peaceful man.  She always said that Chief Joseph was her favorite babysitter.

Yes,
He
Would
Sit
In
His
Rocking
Chair

And
Braid
My
Grandmother’s
Epic
Hair.