Haibun

 

In the spring of 1954, two non-Indian brothers, James and John, and a Chippewa named Leo, went searching for God on the Spokane Indian Reservation.  It was midnight.  They carried Geiger counters and a mineral light.  They found pieces of God whispering beneath a spur of Lookout Mountain.  When they cracked open the earth, it was so bright that it fooled the birds, who lifted into flight.

 

            The half-life of a raven

            is still a life.

            Raven stopped the Flood.

 

First came the arguments about claim rights.  Then came the mining companies and the government.  In 1956, they paid $340,000 for the land that bordered the claim.  My cousins Richard and Lucy Boyd, brother and sister, received most of the money.  Lucy died in a car wreck in 1961.  In 1969, Richard choked to death on a piece of steak.  They buried both on the reservation, though I have never visited their graves.

 

            A rusty tin cup

            sits on a woodstove

            in the abandoned house.

 

The uranium trucks rolled for most of two decades, dropping hot dust on the heads of Indian children standing beside the road.  I remember waving to the truck drivers, who were all white men.  I remember they always waved back.  When the mines closed down, the empty trucks rumbled away.  I cannot tell you how many coffins we filled during the time of the trucks, but we learned to say “cancer” like we said “oxygen” and “love.”

 

            Grandmother died on her couch

            covered with seven quilts,

            one for each of her children.

 

The white men quickly abandoned the mine.  They left behind pools of dirty water, barrels of dirty tools, and mounds of dirty landfill.  They taught us that “dirty” meant “safe.” After the white men left, Indians guarded the mine.  My uncle worked the graveyard shift.  If he listened closely as he made his rounds, he could hear Chimakum Creek, just a few hundred feet to the south.

 

            In this light

            we can see the bones of salmon

            as they swim.

 

For decades, we Spokanes stared into the bright sky with envy and built flimsy wings for ourselves.  For decades, we pressed our breasts and scrotums in a new kind of ceremony.  Now, in 1994, the white men have come back to clean what they left behind.  They plan to dig deeper holes and fill them with fresh water.  They plan to dump indigenous waste into those lakes, and then add waste shipped in from all over the country.  They gave us a 562-page bible that explains why we cannot stop them.

 

            Two suns:

            Abel fell from the sky,

            Cain rose from the lake.

 

                        Sherman Alexi

 

 

Our tools are better than we are, and grow faster than we do.  They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides.  But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history:  to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

       

    Aldo Leopold

p

When the animals come to us,

            asking for our help,

            will we know what they are saying?

 

When the plants speak to us

            in their delicate, beautiful language,

            will we be able to answer them?

 

When the planet herself

            sings to us in our dreams,

            will we be able to wake ourselves, to act?

 

                        Gary Lawless

 

 

q

We can't preserve neighborliness or charity or peaceability or an ecological awareness, or anything else worth preserving, at the same time we maintain an earth-destroying economy.

 

     Wendell Berry

p

The Place Where We Are Right

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.

~ Yehuda Amichai ~

(The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited and translations by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

 

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly understood; an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

G. K. Chesterton