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God's drum, and other cycles from Indian lore cover

God's drum, and other cycles from Indian lore

Chapter 11: WHEN WE DANCE
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About This Book

A sequence of poems evokes dawn through dusk, prairie winds and dust, ritual dances and spirit songs, and mythic reckonings framed as a red apocalypse. Later cycles portray terraced Pueblo landscapes, potters, corn maidens, and ruined pueblos, while final pieces invoke Aztec gods and cosmology. The language is lyrical and imagistic, alternating intimate observation of natural life with ceremonially inflected reflections on death, renewal, and the drumlike rhythms of the earth.

WHEN WE DANCE

When we dance all together,
We men:
The drummers beat their drums,
The singers sing....
In the midst of the vast prairie
We are very small.
Feathers are waving
in the bright sunlight:
Colors are flashing
in the bright sunlight:
A thin dust is floating upward
where our feet are beating the brown earth.
We are dancing because we do not know what to do
about our lives:
All together we are dancing
because we wish to live....
In the midst of the vast prairie
We are a very small nation,
We men.