wyrdwind

First Woman

The Sun smiles upon her.

Nanapesa is not God

as androcentrics and na hullos

know it. We do not worship.

Crosswinds, breath of life,

wheel of time. Mitochondria

stem from your maternal line.

The core of every cell,

what makes you alive.

Its name means

The One Who Sees, she

is always

a daughter of Great Spirit,

the woman who would make

a people. The Choctaw

awoke from clay and mud deep

in the dark of the Mother Mound.

She brought them into the light,

given form. Peeled back

to reveal fresh skin beneath pottery shards.

Wonderment.

So much more than home.

Your first loyalty

is always to the woman

and the land who bore you.

He who done so wrong

as no woman smiles upon

is cast out or put down.

She keeps

a clean house.

Children of the Forest

You must never force

a woman or the Earth. Care

is required. Patience for pleasure.

She has the right to choose.

Well it’s been about 6000 years

since men removed consent

and called it civilization. Love

left the bedchamber. Razed

194,000 worth of Before.

Back to us. Trauma

causes mitochondrial malfunction.

Paired with perverted natural selection,

leaves you wide open to disease. You recognize

PTSD, Depression, Schizophrenia, so on.

This moniker by which we signed

our meager donation, do you know why?

Master agriculturalists at our height,

our forests thrived far and wide.

Starvation scarcely a spot on our minds,

a shriek in the night,

we ferried colder nations through suchlike.

Then the colonizers came.

A Choctaw never numbs

to a woman’s pain. Your Mother’s cry.

We would not countenance. Naked,

bow-backed, clutching her children

to her nurse mud as long as she could, forced

to eat them to survive.

To play by numbers.

Only monsters

force a mother to choose

what percentage

of her children must die.

Nalusa Chito

Know the face

of your enemy. He

is the Soul Eater,

the big black thing,

prefers women and children,

oh but he’ll take anyone.

As many as millions.

Alone in the woods,

in windowless bedrooms,

or swaths of black slime in your fields.

Droves

of emaciated men with shovels.

Hollowed out.

The difference

between death and annihilation:

one pushes forward, one festers within,

one serves the Mother, the other serves Him.

Never forget that wretched stench.

The appropriate amount of wages owed

to live on your land

is none.

Blackthorn

An extinction burst

is a temporary increase in behavior

once reinforcement is removed,

and the warmest hearth of all

belongs to the harshest of crones,

soothes the most wintered of bones.

No one strips you bare faster

than a woman’s lived long enough

to be ugly and alone.

No one comes to visit anymore.

Means you already know

it’s so far gone

you’re threshing marrow.

Ripping every stitch out.

When every elder at a craft store

wishes she’d cut her hair, husband died sooner,

just to become herself,

to be at peace in her house,

ask yourself

are men any better now?

Count the cost.

For a Choctaw

he could be a treasured companion,

never undermined her strength of position,

rose his voice or his hand to her children.

If she sent him away

he gave her a reason.

It was the end of his season.

Even the oldest of women

could know youth yet again

had ever been born

a worthy man.

Little People

Bohpoli or Kowi Anukasha,

that is Throwers and Forest Dwellers,

about two feet tall.

Playful.

Sometimes they steal

a child away to their elders

and that child is given a choice.

Poison, medicine, knife.

The first cannot heal its people.

The second becomes a shaman.

The third is evil.

They measure your nature,

test your patience,

wits and reflexes.

I like to think that Old Woman

is well known to them.

Well at first glance

herbs of woe and wellness

look very much the same.

Chance, fate, or the inner eye

help that child decide.

These children grow up

surrounded by signs.

Whispers, omens, neon lights

adorn their growth habits

in perpetual springtime.

Their innards are obvious,

if you misinterpret

you’re blind.

Or dead

in the event of Knife.

Now Poison

might die ahead of its time.

It takes too much or can’t stop,

means well but chooses wrong.

Feels purpose and power

but can’t finesse its own compounds.

Not enough sense

to cook a raw sloe.

The eaves of its heart

a cursed bower.

Careless, overgrown, thorns.

But given over

to Shaman who knows,

we find that sometimes Poison

can heal its people after all.

Blends and amounts,

pruned, rendered, distilled.

A trove of radiant vials,

a mad woman’s little house,

full

of all the medicine love saw.

Banaha

She has the highest calories

and the highest yield

of all staple crops.

Her modest roots can piggy back

in floating gardens atop bogs,

swamps, or fens. She likes it wet.

Achieves symbiosis,

no strain on her environment.

In moderation.

None can match her raiment,

every color of the land vibrant

as crown jewels, pound for pound

the heaviest hitter for oxygen.

Tanchi is the most sacred.

The key is nixtamalization,

apply an alkalizing solution. Lime or ash.

Pound the kernels in torched out stumps—

we used hickory blown by river cane.

Use whatever you’ve got.

If there’s long winter, you want flint corn.

It’s extra work for delayed reward

but if you thug it out

my girl won’t let you down.

That flour lasts however long,

give her plenty of drippings to soak up, fat, plump.

Bear, hog, butter, whatever you’ve got.

She’ll take seasons and fillings, loves

to be stuffed. Or not.

Now swaddle her tender

in those corn husks.

Nice and snug.

Boil, steam, or fry up.

Fresh potato rolls hard,

keeps it real through the green times,

but corn brings it home

all through the longest night.

It don’t matter how much snow’s outside.

@~^~

Notes: See also Tanchi Story in my earliest post, the specifics of which have traveled down my family line for about 200 years, likely much longer.