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.
wyrdwind 