Voices from the fringes: As we

The first peoples of the Americas became second-class citizens about 27 minutes after the arrival of Europeans, feels like. Inca, Mohawk, Ojibwe, Lakota, Azteca, Diné, Cherokee, Maya—whether complex, sophisticated societies or nomadic tribes, they all fell to the relentless onslaught of the newcomers. Guns, horses, disease, religion; the neighborhood basically was overrun and its residents driven out.

Six centuries later, the dominant culture barely notices the original inhabitants and their voices—if we listen to them—sound cracked to us. Not for lack of use, but for lack of being heard.

My poem for National Poetry Month today is from Layli Long Soldier, an Oglala Lakota who lives in Santa Fé. Poets often play with the sounds and the visuals of their works. Gertrude Stein has to be heard, for example, because on paper, her stuff just looks like a fistful of words flung across the page. (I’m thinking of her “If I told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”.) One of my favorite examples of the visual playground (aside from everything e.e. cummings wrote) is from Guillaume Appollinaire; I couldn’t type “Du coton dans les oreilles”, I had to take screen grabs of it. On account of the way it appeared on the page was integral to the poet’s intent.)

In “Obligations 2”, Long Soldier is using the construction of phrases to bring the reader into the playing out of the heart. I came across this without any introductory or explanatory material, so this is solely my interpretation. But my eye instinctively saw this and began to flow not horizontally, but vertically, like a stream or a waterfall. You can read this poem many, many ways by connecting one line to another back and forth across the page.

Are we meant to embrace the future? Resist the present? Struggle to unbraid? Fail to accept? Work to find?

It all filters through grief, and then we make our way farther as we choose. And your choice may be different from mine or from Long Soldier’s. And it may change every time you read it.

 

“Obligations 2”

                                                     As we

                                         embrace          resist

                           the future       the present      the past

              we work          we struggle          we begin          we fail

 to understand       to find        to unbraid        to accept        to question

               the grief          the grief           the grief          the grief

                           we shift         we wield           we bury​

                                     into light               as ash

                                            across our faces