Seeds
We do not talk
about the old country
As if by erasure
we might reckon
with that loss.
It has been not yet
one hundred years
But our story
is almost
gone.
Assimilation
is a slow death.
A pledge
of allegiance
to forget.
But we cannot
forget.
For we are more
than the race
America gave us
In exchange for our language
and songs
More than the dispossessed
made immigrant
on another’s land.
We are
more human than that.
Miracle
and memory
of soil and sea
A people
of a place upon this Earth
Come a long way
but still
related
Like seeds
to the flower of home.
——-
Binary
My issue
with the straight world
has nothing to do
with sex or gender
But with a duality
of thinking
which imposes
That there is one
and only
one way
of being.
——-
Old Growth
The darkness did not come into my life,
but rose up through
when I began to stray from magic.
Mystery and wonder and play
taught away
by a colonizer’s education.
There was no room for loneliness
in the old growth forest
of a child’s mind
All the light was used for lovely things
like make believe
and flowers.
Despair has tried
to cut me down,
turn my dreams to lumber
But this tree
has roots much deeper
than I thought
And stories
before conquest
to re-member.
And so I have chosen
not to look away
or turn my back upon the darkness
But acknowledge it as invitation
to lean in
closer toward the light.
——-