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Blue butterfly among purple and white flowers in a foggy field

One Poem by Michael Wasson

Landscape with Visual History Centuries Later

I am not here
                      to conquer
         this field of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

q’úx q’úx q’úx
                    xattát:     ’íske ɬéep-1

ɬep:2

         hím’pe
                    puhuhúx—3

 


 

1 [the sound of] clouds / torn [in the hands]: like butterflies
2 [gone] butterflies:
3 in the mouth / a landscape [after a light snowfall]—

 

 

 

Michael WassonMichael Wasson is Nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Lenore, Idaho. He earned a BA from Lewis-Clark State College and an MFA from Oregon State University. The author of Swallowed Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), Self-Portrait with Smeared Centuries (Éditions des Lisières, 2018), translated by Beatrice Machet, and This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017), Wasson is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship in Literature, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, and others. He currently lives in Japan. 

Header photo by LedyX, courtesy Shutterstock.