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

God's drum, and other cycles from Indian lore

Chapter 18: TUMBLEWEEDS
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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.

TUMBLEWEEDS

Great Heads, rolling over the lands....
Giant Heads, tumbling, leaping, pursuing!
Tangled and shaggy, gnashing their cannibal jaws,
Bellowing with the winds, they come....
The lightning reveals them, eyeless, infuriated,
Leaping over the lands—Great Heads, pursuing!
Are they the Race of the Shamefully Dead?
Forever dishonored, forever enraged?
Great Heads, tumbling, leaping, gnashing....
The place of their rest no man hath discovered.