Four for the Road

Four for the Road    
     
I Walpi      
     
Bruja voice of a thousand tears    
Takes us to the sky born wheel    
Where pueblo wonders through centuries    
Upon flower mesa that blossoms love    
For children of dusty walls      
Whose cast iron dreams      
Are a coal stove in a pottery room    
With a lady of ancient designs    
Whose smile is the murmuring sun    
That glimmers through a veil of sand    
When her ceramic children      
With motifs as sacred as the land    
Are too strange for homes of barren wood    
     
II Old Man of Walpi    
     
Windblown sand smile    
Is a night-blooming cereus        
That gathers ancient ghosts        
In circle of slow fire melody        
Whose embers smoke heaven        
Like fine tobacco      
In his inner peace pipe    
That glows with the fire of dust    
Of ashen piles in the gold of love    
Whose gourd rattles    
With seeds to be planted    
In rows where the dark earth      
Gathers her skirts to dance      
     
III Old Oraibi    
     
Room dreams yucca memories    
Whose windblown tears of sand    
Gather in smoky leaves of tea    
Whose stars float in cup of sky    
While eaves rattle like the gourd    
Whose seeds are the rain    
Upon an ancient roof  
   
IV Acoma  
   
Ancient wrinkles of Pueblo legend  
Find sun crystal a gathering of spirits  
That visit in the goldmine of her memory  
When babies cry on the messianic mesa  
She dreams in the old tongue  
With her the last fluent speaker  
Of words only she knows  
In the blackened waste of night  
When petroglyphs chant    
On the lost moonbeam of matriarchy