Ralph Salisbury

Thunderer     God of the turbulent sky     may my turbulent mind shape for my people rain clouds beans pumpkins and yams. East Spirit Dawn Spirit     may birds awaken in the forest of teeth whose river     your color     must say frozen mountains’ prayer that you will loosen them. Spirit of the North whose star is our white mark like the blaze we chop in the black bark where the trail home divides even in our homes we need you to guide. Spirit of the Sunset West may gray clouds hiding friends from me glow like yours that we grope toward each other through a vivid rose. Spirit of the South direction of warm wind warm rain and the winter sun like a pale painting of a morning glory help me     Spirit     that in my mind humble things a man may give to his child may grow the blue of berry orange of squash crimson of radish yellow of corn when the green of even the tallest pine is wolf tooth white. Spirit of the Earth keeper of Mother Father Sister Brother loved ones all once praying as I pray or in some other way Spirit     the black dirt is like the black cover of a book whose words are black ink I can not read but I place my brown hand on snow and pray that more than snow may melt.

Footpath passing a school, undiscovered by a nun black at her blackboard’s explanation of Vanishing Americans’ vanishing, I find myself flagged, by two not quite red rows, unfurled into grin, two white, and by one five-pointed, pale star. My lips let my teeth pledge allegiance, again, my fingers orbiting their own warmth, around this pen, as straight as Old Glory’s tall pole, but admittedly, ingloriously smaller, and, as the star descends, it draws, from Christian calendars’ precision constellations, a child—hand cramped from fisting fact onto dusty black clutching a wand, to draw him Everywhere. Though the teacher scowls us back to my dead, risen from The Trail of Tears as chalk, this day before Thanksgiving Day; a child will lead, as I finish taking my walk.

for my mother and father Apparently I’m Mom’s immaculately-conceived Irish-American son, because, Social-Security time come, my Cherokee dad could not prove he’d been born. He could pay taxes, though, financing troops, who’d conquered our land, and could go to jail, the time he had to shoot or die, by a Caucasian attacker’s knife. Eluding recreational killers’ calendar’s enforcers, while hunting my family’s food, I thought what the hunted think, so that I ate, not only meat but the days of wild animals fed by the days of seeds, themselves eating earth’s aeons of lives, fed by the sun, rising and falling, as quail, hurtling through sky, fell, from gun-powder, come— as the First Americans came— from Asia. Explosions in cannon, I have an English name, a German-Chilean-American wife and could live a white life, but, with this hand, with which I write, I dug, my sixteenth summer, a winter’s supply of yams out of hard, battlefield clay, dug for my father’s mother, who— abandoned by her husband—raised, alone, a mixed-blood family and raised—her tongue spading air— ancestors, a winter’s supply or more.