And this is another one.
This is a poem called "Shooting the Wren."
There's a reference in it to the Seven Sisters.
I come from the Chumash Nation in Santa Barbara in California,
and there is a story about the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters,
about how the tribe came down from the Pleiades,
from the Seven Sisters and descended to Earth.
So that's the reference in the poem
and also about the California Indians in the poem.
Also, shooting the wren--
shooting the wren comes from an old, ancient rite that still
practiced in the Celtic Isles.
It's still practiced in the Isle of Man.
Shooting the wren happens January 2,
and what they actually do is go out and shoot a wren.
There's like a contest for the first person
to shoot the first wren of the season.
It's like a winter, beginning of spring kind of ritual.
So they shoot the wren, and then they tie it up on a cross,
on a wooden cross.
And then they parade around the village with the wren,
and then they have all these festivities and everything.
Well, in the last 50 years, the shooting the wren
has sort of changed over to be sort
of this playful battle between the sexes
so that they have this contest to see
who shoots the first wren of the season
and if it's a male or a female.
And if a woman is the first person
to shoot the wren, then from then
on, for this three-day feast and festival,
all of the men of the village have
to cater and feed the women.
And they're sort of like the slaves of the women
for the rest of this festival.
So there's this playful trying to shoot the wren first,
and when you really think about it, it's like, oh, poor wren.
Wrens aren't that big, anyway.
It's a pretty barbaric custom, but that's
what's shooting the wren is.
It doesn't have much to do with this poem,
but I thought you might want to know about shooting
the wren in the Isle of Man.
"Shooting the Wren."
"He sends trophies from Sunday's kill,
a china pheasant, feathers despicable starling coal,
backs the color of Chilean copper.
They shimmer in the distance, a beautiful expectancy
of only 2.2 years, so who could feel bad
about the downing of another rooster?
The species about wiped out for the hats of the '30s
are plentiful game now.
They succumb to harsh winters, feral cats, coyotes, wild dogs,
and farmers.
The hens preen in the spattered leaves.
A speckle of blood, nearly unnoticed, backs the wolf-down,
and at the quill's tip, a dark tangling in the fluff
of a ringneck's queue.
They gleam iridescence, what was more precious than gold
to an extinguished race.
I walk among the ghosts of history,
the agony of the tortured condemned to their barracks
of serene mustard slopes.
In California-- chinaberry, manzanita, wild boar
imported from Europe.
My ancestors leached acorns, hollowed granite at riverbeds
with kindness, kneading and a steady procession.
My grandmother knew only one constellation, the Seven
Sisters, and she would ask them to help her remember
her grandmother's story of how they descended to Earth
from a fusion of difference.
But it's an unremembered song cut off
at slavery's beck and call.
Her 11-year-old hands deadened at the hard sale of cash,
unlikely, untutored, caring.
She taught me the rights of a hunter
are inalienable, spinning the head of a chicken.
It's true.
We are the fallen angels return to teach
the tenderness of hands, the tough choice of heart.
My grandmother's heart was pure as topaz.
She knew what gives out comes back quantum.
She taught her babies patience with the eye of a feather
smudged with honey.
A day's work could get done as the plume was passed from hand
to hand in the brilliance of sunlight,
bright as it is now as I finger the fray and nap of this gift.
You are of the tender heart.
I know nothing of your hands but [AUDIO OUT],,
what graphite is bound between horizons
of blue, what nature of carbon skin of dead birds
coats the page.
It is true.
You can buy the lean meat of plucked birds.
You can buy fresh hens at the market,
quail the color of chardonnay grapes.
You have reservations where you can purchase
the tokens of the dead.
They bear their own speeches, these silent ones
trading the winds, their own histories and stories.
Tell me a few.
Give it 2.2 years to come to life
and tell a tale of triggers and steel, of tumblers
and the slut peg of the empty chamber.
Mail me a silver bullet from the mountains of your memory.
Your trophies bear witness to gunfire
in the numbed trees of eternity's forests, of winter
in the eastern plains, while I fashion these feathers
into the fragile art of my tribe.
I will wear them when the black of white
never dies, this gift of intent woven in a silent bead.
I'll let it blow through my matted locks,
the weight of a kiss.
What you kill I will pray for.
What you let live we will praise.
We will ignore it and eat."