for Sam Small Eagle
He saw me coming
I was moderately prepared
To be his ally
His face was weathered, cracked
open
Like the canyon walls, their colour in sunlight
Red brown gold
His eyes indefinable.
He said his wife was all white
And I was welcome into his many mansions.
I recalled that dimension,
Different, rounder than paleface time,
Multi-faceted, turning to meet itself.
We sat on the mesa top on the rockface
Discussing wars and bloodlines and possibilities
His kin hovered around us, waiting for money to pass palms
The journey unfolded, like the slabs
of rock, rough
And smooth, no step the same, everything unexpected
The damp sand collected around my bare toes. I was home.
The two men bonded over the eagle's
eye
The dark became light, the sun set, the Star Nation waking
The odour of pine and cooling rock, pungent and healing
There was a price to pay, the Canyon
spirit would have it
The souls of those long dead cried out still
We prayed, standing; Christ, he said, would sacrifice the world
He was not a Christian. He was Navajo.
His life, his ancestors, his heritage, his Spirit.
Che! The Canyon echoed back its own name, meeting itself.
Three eagles, we flew along the
steep plateau
Guests of the ancestors and the Star Nation.
Forgiveness in time, but the Canyon would have us descend
Deeper into the mysteries. Spirits
of sacred places
Know our needs. Alone, I would have descended in the bright darkness.
But for the moment, we must rise back to this upper world
To meet familiar selves, to hold
together the semblance of self.
We must give up fear in such places and trust our guide
Who had moved through time and was his own ancestor enemy:
Anasazi, the Old People the New
People replaced
And then came Kit Carson and the killing of the innocents.
The Canyon rejected them. Our paler feet were the first
On that place since those boots
of betrayal
If our hearts had not been pure, the Spirit of Che
Would have tossed us over the edge, as the brave Navajo woman
Took her assailant to his death,
there below where
They ploughed their fields and birthed babies
Like Sam himself, seventy-odd years since
A wiry warrior, a tall man of peace
and a woman who would be
Warror and peacemaker, we journeyed into the Canyon de Che
To make peace with one another, to manifest destiny.
Never underestimate the magic of
the sacred place of power
To transform the drunk and disorderly, the cowardly,
The starstruck, into real people or small flying eagles
After returning from a Magical Journey into the Navajo Nation, to Canyon
de Chelly, Arizona, May 30, 1995
Back to At Home in Bell Buckle