Desert
In the red light last night, as sky was evening,
a slender, long-eared fox disappeared into the gold line of horizon,
following a path of daylight,
one more animal constellation
matching herself with earth.
giving herself to the warm breath of time.
Here we might say life refuses itself
but for the holy acacia tree
whose strong leaf medicine is bitten from the leaves
by passing creations
and made some days into tea by my sister.
But the blue cypress stands alone.
At dawn all the heads of creature life rise up like spirits,
the serpent gods, the great large spiders,
small rodents like meerkats
wanting drops of dew,
and over there
a curled up fox with gold eyes
uncurls herself to drink from her own fur.
No one asks how this desert came to be
until wind blows sand from the entrances to dark caves
and they look like dreams.
But yesterday could never have imagined tomorrow,
not the walls inside those black hollows they call rooms
that tell the stories painted
of how star beings entered darkness,
having come down to tell us what they knew
a thousand years back,
what they knew
of rich earth, dark land and fruited gardens,
food enough to feed so many,
the people thinking it would always be
growing there,
never imagining how poorly
the people knew this world
and how badly they turned the earth.
How Trees Call Down the Rain
Singing,
the cedar
unlocks itself to water others
when there is drought.
It sends water through saved roots
to other roots.
Let us stand for the leaves of others
open enough to hold
a cup, they say,
then pour themselves on the leaves below,
and those to the ones beneath
who will then remember to open buds
in the history of becoming leaves,
and singing, they remember
that first falling, the scent.
Such beautiful rain.
Our Love is the call to your forest cathedral,
and you, rain, know we accept you,
how we need you,
every complicated and brilliant
being here. Spring buds are waiting
the first opening of clouds.
The tips of Evergreens want to grow.
New leaves to form.
Fluids rise. They rise, then fall, and rise
when trees sing.
Some humans hear this song.
They lay with an ear on the tree.
I lie down with the forest
and listen, not for the heartbeat that can’t be seen,
only heard, only felt,
but then the first drops of rain
touch my skin,
touch the bark
touch the trees,
the whole earth
touched.
Bird
Far north, my friend,
I find your life is sinking,
your people leaving
the melting world with nothing
to embrace and hold the trees,
and so they fall, those beautiful leaves,
along with the brush, its dark berries sweet
plunging into mud,
the rotting leaves becoming poison
against this earth. It is great betrayal, the large lake
sinking into itself
and leaving all the
beloved animals
no place to go, the birds no water
to land.
They are gone.
Like you, only one came home,
This is what your father divined long ago,
one bird arriving.
For hundreds of years migrating birds, too many to count,
are now the missing.
They knew by stars the feel of earth, those winged,
the first people belonging to this land
said only one arrived. You held it tight
and made for it a lake,
small but right
you offered
its given rite.
Chckasaw writer Linda Hogan’s newest book of poems is A History of Kindness (Torrey House Press) which received both Colorado and Oklahoma Book Awards. Her nonfiction includes a collection of essays, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, and most recently, The Radiant Lives of Animals, which received the (inaugural) 2022 National Book Foundation for Science and Literature Award. Linda was inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame in 2007 for her contributions to indigenous literature. Her work has received an American Book Award and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, the Wordcraft Circle, and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association. Her most recent awards are the 2016 Thoreau Priz from PEN, a 2018 Native Arts and Culture Award, and the Los Angeles Times and Riverside Lifetime and Achievement Award 2022. In 2023, Linda received an Honorary PhD in Humane Letters from the University of Colorado.
Read an interview with Linda Hogan also appearing in Terrain.org: “Of Panthers and People.”
Header photo by Ondrej Prosicky, courtesy Shutterstock.
