WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
God's drum, and other cycles from Indian lore cover

God's drum, and other cycles from Indian lore

Chapter 20: MIRAGE
Open in WeRead

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.

MIRAGE

The footfalls of many feet are on the prairies,
Treading softly, like the rustling of shaken grasses;
In the air about me is a sound scarce audible,
As of the wings of silent birds, low-flying....
What are they that move in the luminous mid-day,
Invisibly, intangibly?...
It is hot and whisperingly still;
I see only the quivering air there on the far horizon,
And beyond it a lake of cool water lifted into the sky:
Pleasant groves are growing beside it,
Very distant I see them....
Are these men come out of the silence to walk beside me?
Are these gods who flit with invisible wings?