Ballet of the Hors d'Oeuvre

The gentlemen down front
at the Opera House,
the pretended balletomanes
who crowd the best seats
for calf- and leg-views,
brood over the program.

Tonight’s dance interval
amid the modernist opera’s
banging and clanging is — what? —
Ballet of the Hors d'Oeuvre.
“Horse Doovers?” asks one.
“Whore’s Works!” another,
adept at translation (he is after all
an international banker) says
assuredly. A third,
the monocled one, harrumphs
and simply pronounces
“Or derve, gentlemen,
as in — appetizers.”

A welcome roll from the timpani
muffles the disgrace
of the top-hat tycoons
as the ballet commences.
The music is, thank God, melodic.

First come the celery sticks,
vaguely aphrodisiac,
stalking on stage in stiff
march time, leaf-fringed
and vertical, tilting in time
to the Danse Crudité
and deftly choreographed
considering the absence
of any visible eyes.

As if to mock men’s
expectations of limbs exposed,
two dozen chicken wings
crab-walk in unison
from left to right, then
right to left, then leap
into a wagon, a heap
of unappealing angles,
pulled off the stage
by a Harlequin cat.

Seedless grapes tumble
to a fast gigue
around a gaggle
of dowager strawberries,
the vast Chernobyl kind,
red-rouged, bewigged
with vernal leafage,
plump and no doubt
devoid of any trace of flavor.

To a Chinese flute, squat
four-lobed dumplings arrive
tip-toe on red shoes
scarcely visible
beneath the deep-fried
ballooning gowns.
Slow sarabanding,
the Crabs Rangoon
accelerate to dervish
then spin off stage.

A Danse Génerale
of crackers, round and square,
pair off against various
cheeses in national attire
raising the whole affair
to a Tchaikovskian frenzy.
Skirts fly, thighs bulge, as,
cubed, sliced, and quartered,
yellow and white, blue and orange,
they whirl and pair, unpair and tease
the desperate and crumbling crackers.
Then, finally, a show of stage magic
as each cheese maid slides through
the narrow blade of a slicer
and emerges as two likenesses,
whirling accelerando
until every Tilsit, Gouda,
Cheddar and Blue
meets her destined cracker
and goes obscenely
horizontal.

The front row gentlemen
are beside themselves
as the curtain falls.
What to do until the third act?
Backstage in the Green Room
where the undressing, redressing
ballerinas pretend not to be watched
by the drooling financiers,
what was one to do?

“I suppose,” the monocled one hazards,
“although we’re not even sure
which were the ladies,
we could go back for a nibble.”

Burnt Offering

Anakreon, to Harmodius:
About that letter, the fervent one,
the one you hinted you’d sell when I die,
mocking its shaking autograph,
intimating the scandal --
I know your threat is false.
last night in my sleep I saw
your hands on a crumpled scroll,
the thrust toward a sputtering lamp,
the tiny screams as my words,
my awesome and unrepeatable vows,
my praise of your unworthy beauty,
collapsed and withered in a blue-green flame.
You brushed the ashes from your gentle arms --
they scattered, mingled with dust motes,
rode a moonbeam in a moment’s leap
toward ghosthood, then dissipated.
Only one moth, before its suicide,
dipped in the ash and shared
one final taste of my missive.
No Phoenix rose, the earth
did not open to swallow you,
and your disdainful triumph
did not diminish the cosmos.

Yet he who burns love letters
offends the Gods.
You dare undo my holy madness
with your little hecatomb
of paraffin and oil?
They will come back to sting you,
my salamander syllables.
Try and love anyone now! Your sunken cheeks
and pale complexion will drive all away.
All will know you are pursued and haunted.
You will wish you had kept the living scroll
when you see how Love, an ash-faced Fury,
comes back from Acheron,
a broom hag to drive
your suitors off,


nightmare’s bedmate, engendering
alarming sores and bruises,
leaving you spent and exhausted
as though a nest of incubi
used you for practice.

Besides,
I kept a copy.

As Idols Fall in the Afghan Hills

Time to get out of Afghanistan! Here's a slight revision of a poem I wrote before 9-11, on reading about the Taliban's destruction of a huge Buddha that had been carved into a mountainside. I had a vision of a carpet bombing of tiny Buddhas or Bodhisattvas (the spirits who undertake to return to linger in mortal life to do good deeds. Little did I suspect... Here's the poem:

What to do? What to do?
Mail a Mullah a thousand portraits
of Boddhisatvas.

Airdrop a hundred thousand Buddhas
on tiny parachutes onto the streets of Kabul.

Mate giant Japanese Buddhas with Godzilla,
send their offspring to the Afghan Hills
to sit serene in lotus pose

(but watch their fire-breath melt Taliban tanks
and send the soldiers shrieking!)

Skywrite LORD BUDDHA
from border to border in every known language.

Or wait for Karma to burn the burners,
shatter the shatterers, silence the mouths
of the speakers of law?
(No time, no time as the dynamite explodes
a Buddha head from fifteen hundred years ago.)

Let Allah, Buddha Christ and Brahma
rage like comets, moth fluttering
around the Man Sun.

One vanity makes them a greater vanity destroys them.
Yet a child with hands in clay, in the mud by the riverside
will make a new god with broad shoulders
far-seeing eyes, a forgiving visage,
a palm extended for the benediction
of unbearable Beauty, brief life
the only coin we can offer.

This parched land needs its memories,
its slender share of human fairness.
It needs a spark of hope
against the dark night
of goats and dynamite.

Miner's Cemetery: Atacama Desert, Chile

Whatever is put in Atacama
stays in Atacama —
a wreath of roses,
every petal intact
in perfect desiccation;
miners’ pine markers
untouched by rot or termite,
the wooden chapel’s planks
striated fossils,
unrusted nails a century old,
copper and tin communion cups
all but untarnished,
the last wine’s dregs
a crystal ring.

The graves are shallow,
the fence a mere
formality,
for no one comes here —
the miners’ mummies
will be miners’ mummies
till the sun grows cold.

One thousand miles
of desert coast
surround this graveyard,
the vast Pacific
begrudging one drop
of rainfall,

the only damp
at the cliff-edge
and off-shore islands,
the unceasing splatter
of guano,
gulls’ gift,
millennial deposits
a hundred yards thick,
the Andes’ answer
to Dover,

mined by coolies
for explosive nitrates,
then, as luck would have it,
the miners of Bolivia,
Peru and Chile followed
to dig the hard ground
of the desert flats
for the mountains’ run-off —
more nitrates, the Titan’s ichor,
without which guns
would be mere toys —
nitrates to fertilize
the sugar-beet fields
of pastry-mad Europe —

miners worked dead
in a place
where even their sweat
was stolen.

Rain comes, on average,
just once in forty years.
If you blink,
you miss it.
To the dead
it has the faintest sound,
like the turning of one page.

The Outcast

The boy is not like
    the others.
Their bikes ascend the hill,
storm down like whirlwinds.
He always walks,
  their wheels
   a dervish dance
whose physics baffle him.
He passes the practice field,
hopes no one will notice him
as he carries his books
on the way to the library

(they don't wear glasses,
    don't read anything
    between June and August).

He has no idea
    what their cries mean,
    why it matters
that a ball goes
    this way,
         that way.

When they let him join in,
    he runs with some older boys,
over a fence he can barely scale,
    watching for dogs that bite,
to the forbidden
    apple tree.


They climb to reach
    the great red ones.
From high above
    they taunt him,
dare him to join them
at the sky-scream treetop.


He stands below.
Climbing a tree
    is one of many things
    he's not allowed to do.
They talk about baseball
    and BB guns,
the cars they'll drive
when they're old enough,
the names of girls
whose breasts have swollen.

He reaches up
    for the lower branch
    takes unripe apples,
    unmarred by bird or worm.

Walking alone,
    he sees a daytime moon,
    wonders how Earth
    might look from its craters.

He goes home to his comics,
    to the attic room
    where aliens and monsters
    plan universal mayhem.

Don't eat those apples,
    his mother warns him.
They'll give you a stomach ache.

I like them, he says.
Green apples taste better.

When Did I Know

That I was the thing they don’t speak of,
whose nicknames even were unprintable?
Was it all the way back
at school’s beginning, when I knew
and could name the prettiest girl
in answer to my mother’s Who
would you marry? but didn’t tell
that I could also rank the boys
in tiers of beauty, had anyone asked?

So many moments, so early:

When a boy cousin jumped on top of me
and said Let’s play husband and wife —
twelve going on thirteen I had no idea
what that meant, except
it was the first time anyone touched
who wasn’t hitting me. Even through clothes
the feel of flesh on flesh made me tremble.

When my best friend, wrestling
me down on my narrow bed, asked
Why do you always let me win?
and I couldn’t answer.

When I stopped being alone, ever,
with my grandfather, who,
whiskered in his long underwear
would try to pin me down
with sadistic tickling on any day
the women were out of sight.
Because the body is a poem, mine
for my use and not another’s, mine
to discover its vocabulary.

When boys and girls huddled
hushed in a backyard tent,
a new game with much at stake,
showing their forbidden parts
by flashlight, I looked away
at the girls’ turn, then lay awake
remembering the slow unzip
of the boys’ trousers.

When one of the girls
it was dangerous to know
contrived a dozen ways
for me to walk her
through lonely places, woods,
even the night-time graveyard,
and I was a gentleman always.
(And when another, heaped
against me on the dance floor,
finally blurted despairingly,
Don’t my breasts interest you?)

When, as a seventh grader
on the first day of school I watched
in mingled horror/fascination
as senior boys emerged
from the gym class showers,
and then I dreamt of dark caverns
or a secret-passage attic
where all of them,
in an endless state of dressing,
undressing and self-caressing
lined up in an A to Z roll call,
slaves of my eyes’ hunger.

When I watched one after another
Godzilla and Toho monster films
and could not take my eyes off —
no, not the lumbering, costumed
monsters —  but Japanese men,
young ones, hard-cheeked,
dark-eyed and raven-haired,
an urge I could never plummet
to sated boredom.

And why, when I learned
that some men were otherwise inclined,
did my mouth not utter, ever,
the expletives? Surprised, delighted
even, each clue and glimmer
of a kindred species like a key shard,
a piece to be joined with other pieces
until the rainbow bridge could be completed,
my exit up and out of this
world I did not belong to.

If there had been a place to go
to meet them, I would have gone there.

But most of all is that starburst
explosion when you find the one face,
the one accepting glance, the one
surrendered night when all is given,
all asked-for taken with joy,
to know that the love given here
is as cosmic as any force in the universe,
to want and to be wanted by the same person.

I never asked to be normal.
Always and ever,
     for as long as I can remember
I was not like the others,
and the joy-quest yearning
was to find others
     equally blessed, equally scorned.
The names they call us
were nothing compared to the golden vowels,
the sibilants, the fluted song-tones
by which we would greet one another.

Somehow,
     in the dark of nightside passages,
and in the intervals of daylight
they grant us, we find our own,
either the fervent flesh-touch
of youth to youth, or the helping
hand of our elder kind, the lift
and repair of wings broken, hopes
not yet dashed by mortality.
We have our own biology and history.
Our children are the things we make,
our fossils the Trilobites of culture.
Try to imagine the world without us.

Spring Earth

Somewhere it is always spring—

here, too, perhaps,

within these barren trees.

The thought, the idée fixe

the twig to be

outlasts the snowstorms.

Its double helix symphony

sleeps on in xylem,

unravels in sequestered leaves.

Some seeds refuse to sprout

until a winter has seasoned them,

as cunning monarchs outlive

their enemies.

Earth thaws.

Tendrils reach out

beneath me.

Seed’s urge unjackets me,

soaks me to root in run

   through falling rain.

I taste the sky,

    limestone and elemental iron,

    phosphor and calcium,

inhale the animal sweetness of air,

soak up the sunlight,

open a cotyledon eye,

banish all frost

in bacchanalian riot.

It is time! It is time!

Pluto Demoted

A poem protesting the move to strip Pluto of its designation as a planet, and a tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto on photographic negatives of star photographs in 1932. There's also a reference to H.P. Lovecraft, who called the as-yet-undetected ninth planet "Yuggoth" in his writings.

No longer a planet, they say!
Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth*, Nine
is now a nothing,
a rock among rocks

despite the tug of its companion,

silent and airless Charon,

the loyal circling
of Nix and Erys.**

Now you are a “mini-world,”

an oversize asteroid

tumbling in dustbelt

so dark and distant

our sun is but a blob

of wavering starlight.

World of death and darkness,

methane, monoxide molting

in every orbiting,

shunned by the sun that made you,

must you now be snubbed by man?

How demote a planet

so lustrous in history?

It has its gods! It has its gods!

Can they evict

  the Lord of the Dead

with just a say-so?

What of the millions of souls

whose home was Hades?

What of beautiful Persephone

who shuttles still

   on a high-speed comet

for her six-month residency

as mistress of the underworld?

What of the heroes and philosophers,

the shades of pagan times

who teem those basalt cities

warming the Plutonian night

with odes and songs and serenades?

Are they to be homeless vagabonds,

slowed from their distant heartbeat

to the stillness of absolute zero?

****

At first, it was “Planet X,”

   out there somewhere

   because Neptune wobbled,

   nodded its rings

   toward Death’s domain.

Then a Kansas farm boy

obsessed with the stars

   ground his own mirrors

   built his own telescope

   with car parts and farm equipment.

Hailstones destroyed the farm crops.

   The telescope survived.

The boy sent drawings of Mars

    and Jupiter

to Lowell Observatory —

Come work for us, they said.

He hopped a train, had just enough

   cash for a one-way fare.

And then, in monk-like hermitage

he toiled at Flagstaff,

comparing sky photographs,

hundreds of thousands of stars,

negative over negative to light,

searching for celestial wanderers,

planetoi, asteroids, comets

that moved when everything else

stood still in the cosmos.

Clyde Tombaugh, twenty-four,

surveyed a sky

where fifteen million lights

the brightness of Pluto twinkled

but only one was Pluto.

He found it.

***

They sought him out

in his retirement,

those fellows

from the Smithsonian,

asked for his home-made instrument

for their permanent collection.

“Hell no,” he said,

“I’m still using it.”

***

I would as soon

forget Kansas as Pluto.

Tell Tombaugh’s ghost

his planet is not a planet!

I can see the old man now,

just off the death-barge

he hopped from Charon,

greeting the Lords of Acheron,

that rusted tube of telescope

under his arm,

scouting a mountaintop

for his next observatory.

Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine!

Change at your peril

a thing once named!

Yuggoth is the name assigned to the Ninth planet, before its discovery, in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
* Nix and Erys are two smaller satellites of Pluto.

Monday, Miss Schreckengost Reads Us Little Black Sambo

I

We three boys, in the third-grade playground,

one skinny (that’s me), one short, and the fat one,

horn-rimmed glasses all, schoolbooks and lunches

in hand-me-down, important-looking briefcases.

We are the serious scholars, the brainiacs —

we know what the ominous Sputnik is beeping

and even why it’s there and doesn’t fall —

just ask us! We are no good at sports,

try not to be noticed amid the yelling,

the bigger boys’ heave and toss of baseball,

football, basketball, whatever ball

it is the season for. We trade our comics,

Superman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern,

and offer furtive glances at the forbidden ones,

brain-rotting horror comics some Congressman

has warned our parents to confiscate and burn.

We’re saving up to buy sulfuric acid;

a long list of chemistry projects depends

on the pharmacist, Mr. Hoffmann, dispenser

of potions, acids, saltpeter and horehound drops.

“Now, boys,” he’d warn us, winking,

“don’t go mixing saltpeter with sulfur,

’cause that plus a little charcoal is gunpowder.

Don’t get yourselves in trouble, okay?”

Oh, no, Mr. Hoffmann, we promise,

we’d never do that, Scouts’ honor.

Not one of us is a Boy Scout.

The sun-drenched playground, dark

in the hulking late-day shadow

of the brick schoolhouse, knows fear:

the monthly air-raid sirens, the file

of all of us quickly-quickly-quickly-now

to the basement shelter, the practice

of “duck and cover” in the event of a flash,

a boom and a mushroom cloud

obliterating Pittsburgh on the horizon.

Russkies and Gerries, Japs and Fascists,

Jack-in-the-box Communists

beneath the bedsprings, enemies everywhere.

Monday, Miss Schreckengost, sometime

between geography and “Our Friend the Atom,”

reads an old book to us — you’ll like this,

she tells us — it’s Little Black Sambo.

It even has pictures.      The tall boy,

the altogether too tall boy in the front row

sinks into his seat.  All eyes are on Ritchie,

the Negro boy, held back a year, two years

from the looks of him, too broad of shoulder

to even consider playing with us.

He sits all day where the teacher can mind him.

The story unfolds. Proud little Sambo,

in his new red coat, his beautiful blue trousers,

is ambushed by tigers who want to eat him.

He bribes one with his jacket, one with

his beautiful trousers, runs home

stark naked to his mother and father,

Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo.

Black Mumbo, who looks like Aunt Jemima,

celebrates the boy’s escape with a pancake dinner.

As the book is held up to show its cover

someone calls out, “Hey, that’s Ritchie!”

Laughs roil the air like veldt heat.

On Tuesday we add Ritchie Barton

to the list of things to be afraid of.

The downhill road to Caruso’s market

becomes a gauntlet run — the price

of a candy bar was meeting Ritchie’s fists.

The older boys, untouchable, catch on,

yell Sambo! Look out for tigers!

from the schoolhouse windows.

Your mama’s name is Black Mumbo!

Your pappy’s name is Black Jumbo!

One day the fifth-grade bullies,

to our slight relief,

are knocked to the ground before us.

Words thunder                                      AIN’T

     punctuate the blows                         NO

     as he pounds Timmy                         TIGERS

     to the pavement                                 IN AFRICA!

Smaller boys run,                                 MY MA’S NAME

     take the long way home                  IS ABIGAIL!

     as he pummels Anthony                  MY PA’S NAME

     against a fencepost                            IS SAMUEL!

Fist-crack, nose-break,

tooth-snap, Ritchie’s

near-baritone shouts

haunt our dreaming.

II

Miss Schreckengost makes seat assignments

for our field-trip to the hydroelectric dam.

“Forty of us,” she counts, “and forty seats.”

A kind of chill comes over the classroom.

“Of course we’ll draw lots for seat-mates.

You will stay with your seat-mate for the whole trip.”

David, the Polish boy, the smallest in class,

is told he will sit next to Ritchie Barton.

At recess, he bursts into tears in the playground.

“I can’t sit next to him. I just can’t do it.”

And I say to Dave, “You’re prejudiced.

You’re only saying that because he’s a Negro.”

That ends the conversation.

The one thing no one wants is to be prejudiced.

That’s worse than being a Nazi or a Communist.

Dave says, his back to all of us,

“I just don’t want to get beat up.”

The day of the trip to Confluence Dam,

the Polish mother keeps her son at home.

Ritchie sprawls across two seats, feet up,

a clenched right fist slapping an open left palm.

We walk a double-line with seat-mates,

Richie alone and trailing far behind,

Miss Shreckengost flamingo-tall ahead of us,

arms pointing at engineering wonders and waterfalls.

I sit in the seat behind Ritchie; Gertrude,

a girl reputed to have head lice,

sits next to me, red pigtails flying.

I have a headache, some dark thing troubling me.

If I’m not prejudiced, I think, then I should sit

in that empty spot beside Ritchie, whose fist and palm

keep time to the road rhythms. All I can see

are noses, teeth, crutches and splints.

I do not want to be beaten, either.

I am not prejudiced.

One day, I would read in Homer:

More hateful to me than all the gates of Hell

is that man who, holding one thing in his heart,

says another, as I would learn the word hypocrite.

Whatever that thing was that I had uttered,

and could not undo, I was ashamed of it.

I vowed never to do it again.

III

Years later, new town, step-fathered,

we take a family road-trip to Washington.

The parks are filled with picnickers,

families in Sunday whites, blankets and baskets,

matrons with parasols, young couples courting.

They are dressed better than we are,

and there is not one white face among them.

Our angry car passes them, windows up,

doors locked, from Washington Monument

to Lincoln Memorial, a cursory nod

to two Presidents, then off we go

to stepfather’s cousin in Maryland.

I remember a handsome, ranch-style home.

I was sent to the living room, turned on

an expensive stereo, where I listened to

the Glazounov Concerto, played by Heifetz.

These must be nice people, I thought.

I went to the kitchen door, listening:

Never seen so many in one place, you say?

They own the city. No decent white folk

will even go there. In a couple weeks

they’re gonna have a Civil Rights March,

a half a million niggers all together,

and that Commie Martin Luther King.

Wish I could get to a rooftop

with this here rifle —

and I know how to use it, too —

wish I could pick him off

and take as many of them with him

as I could, along with those Jew lawyers

I tip-toe back to Russian Glazounov,

          to Jewish Heifetz.

IV

College, and freedom:

“You’ll do it with me?” he said, incredulous.

He thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

Once I had said yes, I had to do it.

I’d done it by then,

with artists, frat boys and athletes,

my notoriety a sure ticket

to never having to ask: they asked me.

But no one black had ever asked me.

His basketball arms and legs,

     impossibly long,

     thrust out of his clothes at impossible angles.

An African prince,

     he could snap me in two easily.

“You know what they say about us?”

he asks, teasingly, shirt sliding off.

     I nod.

“It’s true. You’ll see. No turning back.”

His lithe and supple body presses me,

each second more of him

hot against me. I’m shaking.

He pushes me downward,

my hands on his chest

exploring the statue-lines

smooth as marble.

We end up in bed, I’m gasping

against his spent repose. He lets

me examine the palm of his hand,

yes it is lighter there. One rivulet

of pearl-white fluid remains

upon his dark brown forearm.

He puts my mouth there.

I am afraid to pull away.

It is too quiet. I start to shiver.

I am waiting for the rage-burst,

counting how fast I might make it

to the door and out.

 “I’m not going to hurt you,”

he assures me. “That was good.

We’ll do it again sometime.”

He stays a while. I ask

a torrent of questions,

want to know his feelings,

the truth beneath

the hard and proud exterior.

“You want to know

that no one will rent me a room

in this town? Or about the girl,

the white girl who’ll only see me

under the bridge at midnight?

Or what they’d do to me

if anyone found out?

Or where I’d be

if I didn’t play basketball?”

Just as he’s leaving, I say,

“Oh, what’s your name?

I’m sorry I didn’t ask it.”

“Ritchie,” he says.

“My name is Ritchie.”

The Tea Party

New neighbor girls have settled in.

We hear the squeals and screams,

the mother calls and father scoldings

through the open windows.

An angry hedge divides us in back,

though our houses lean together,

shingles and sagging porches

almost blending, identical

weeds abuzz with bumblebees.

The low-slung church

of solemn Mennonites

sits glum and silent

across the street.

The girls' names are Faith and Abby,

my mother tells me,

ten and seven in stiff blue dresses.

Their parents never spoke to us.

Just up the hill, behind a fence,

white-washed and cedar-lined,

Charlene and Marilyn,

   the Jewish girls

live in the great brick house

(anything brick

     is a mansion to us).

I play canasta with Marilyn (my age),

learn to admire her parents,

watch as they light

     the Chanukah candles,

move among them summers

as hundreds congregate

at their swimming pool.

Their mother loves opera,

but not, she says,

not Wagner.

One August day,

an invitation comes,

crayon on tablet paper,

for tea with Faith and Abby.

My mother says be nice and go.

I sit in their yard

with toy furniture.

The doll whose daddy

I'm pretending to be

has one arm missing.

The tea, which is licorice

dissolved in warm water,

is served in tiny cups,

tarnished aluminum,

from a tiny aluminum teapot.

I want to gag

     from the taste of it,

but I sip on and ask for more.

Now Faith addresses me.

"I'll dress the baby

and we shall take her to church."

"Oh, we don't go to church,"

I told my newfound Mrs.

"Never, ever?"

                      "Not even once?"

I shook my head --

I've never set foot inside a church.

"That's just what Daddy told us!"

Abby exclaimed. "You'll go to Hell!"

"You'll go to Hell and be damned!"

they chanted,

"You'll go to hell and be damned!"

"What else does your Daddy say?"

I asked them.  "He says

you'll go to Hell and be damned,

because you're atheists and heathens."

Faith looked fierce,

She poured more tea

and made me take it,

as if it were holy water,

as if I would drink

baptism by stealth.

She raised her cup daintily,

glanced and nodded

at the fence and the cedars.

"Charlene and Marilyn

will go to Hell, too,

right to the bottom

of the flaming pit,

because they're Jews

and murdered Jesus.

Would you like ice cream now?"

At the Wood's Edge: Iroquois Funeral Rite

(A translation into verse of "Okayondoghsera Yondennase:

Oghentonh Karighwateghwenh," from the Iroquois' Ancient Rites of

the Condoling Council: Preliminary Ceremony)

My son, I am surprised to hear your voice

come through the forest to this open place.

You come with troubled mind, through obstacles.

You passed, my son, the grounds where fathers met,

whose hands we all depended on. How then

come you in ease? You tread the paths

our forebears cut, you all but see the smoke

from where they passed their pipes. Can you

be calm when you have wept along the way?

Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt.

Now let us smoke the clay pipe together.

We know that all around us enemies

each think, “We will not let them meet!”

Here, thorny ways that bar — there, falling trees—

in shadowed glades, the beasts that wait to slay.

Either by these you might have perished,

my son. The sudden floods destroy; dark nights

the vengeful hatchet waits outside the house;

invisible disease is always near.

(Each day our mortal foes are wasting us!)

Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt.

What great lament if any had died there

along the way, and running words had come,

“Yonder lie bodies, of those who were chiefs!”

We, who come to mourn another, would cry,

“What happened, my son? — Why do you not come?”

In time of peace or peril we do this —

ancestors made the custom, demanding:

Here they must kindle a ritual fire,

here, in the light, at the edge of the woods,

condole with each other in chosen words.

--This poem was published in Sensations Magazine, Spring Summer 2009.