OFELIA ZEPEDA: --Oneida from the Green Bay area,
Green Bay, Wisconsin.
So we're changing geography a little bit here.
Her academic training and background
include an undergraduate degree from the University
of Wisconsin and a master's of fine arts
from the University of Montana at Missoula,
where she studied under Richard Hugo
and was also a fellow student of James Welch, who we'll
have here after spring break.
Roberta is currently faculty at the University of Wisconsin Eau
Claire and is also a graduate student
at the University of Minnesota, working
on her doctorate degree.
Roberta has published in various magazines and anthologies,
including Carriers of the Dream Wheel, American Poetry
Review, The Nation, and North American Review.
She is also the author of Star Quilt,
a collection of her poems.
And she's currently in the process
of doing a biography of her grandmother, who
was one of the first Native American physicians.
This morning, I had the pleasure of being
with Roberta and some of our students
as she spoke to us of her background.
And I not only listened to her, but I watched her speak.
And she reminded me so much of another Seneca woman,
another Iroquois woman who I knew for some time.
And similarly, as my Seneca friend
used to speak about the land in the east.
And their situation there, and how different and often
how similar situations are with the Indigenous people
here in the Southwest.
But in watching her, I also remembered
what such a strong and handsome people the Iroquois are.
I would like to think that perhaps sometime,
if something should happen to our world,
and if there was a remote possibility
that we were to come out of it, I
think that I would like to follow these Iroquois women out
of here.
Iroquois women, of course, being the Seneca and the Cayuga
and the Onondaga and certainly the Oneida.
So would you please welcome Roberta Hill Whiteman.
ROBERTA J. HILL: Thank you for the introduction.
I'm very honored to be here and to share with you my work.
And this has been quite an experience,
to see the interest that people have here in the literature.
And I'll just begin by reading a few poems from Star Quilt.
And then I'll read some other work that is much more recent.
My husband and I met in the late '70s.
And when we met we had both lived on opposite ends
of the country.
He's in Wyoming.
He was in Wyoming.
And I was in Wisconsin.
And so when we first then started
getting together and meeting one another,
I wrote a poem that's included in Star Quilt.
And it's a love poem.
It's called "A Song for What Never Arrives."
"We aren't like those who kiss like fishes, lightly,
easily, quickly gone.
Let's sink entwined to those reaches beyond this human world
where tongues of ripples form familiar kinship.
Inside me, summer leaves have begun a meditation.
And I wake from dreams as one might wake
from fever, bewildered by the smoke billowing
from my neighbor's chimney.
When the vacant sapphire sky finds an alley of black trees,
I feel you haunt an unknown layer of my heart.
How can I set in order this debris?
It's all I am.
Charmed by illusion, by nature consistently cruel and kind.
Born to confusion.
Perhaps we shouldn't plan to arrive at the end of love,
but should move inside its mystery like chickadees,
those acrobats darting in and out of branches paled by frost.
Perhaps it's best we accept the thrum of water alone.
Like weeds, we grow submerged in shadows,
feeding on the last fire of a stone.
Yet, we can emerge from our lagoon.
So tangled up, the children, reaching for one tinted bloom,
will gather both, blazing quietly as stars."
My husband and I married in 1980.
And we have children who are 17, 16, and 15.
So we work real quickly.
[LAUGHTER]
They grew real quickly.
Actually, it was our second marriage for both of us.
And the children are from our earlier marriages.
And so we had to become a blended family.
And one of the experiences that we had--
the children met each other when they
were three, four, and five.
And one of the experiences that I treasure
in those early years is that we went to a park on Mother's Day
called Newport Beach, which if you're familiar with Wisconsin,
it's shaped like a hand, and then the thumb.
The park is at the very end of the thumb in Wisconsin,
at the end of that peninsula.
And it was an amazing kind of place.
I had never seen such a park with so many different kinds
of ecologies.
And we went on a trail called Lynn Point Trail.
And it was the experience of watching
these young children feel so very at home there,
wanting to stay there.
They wanted to dance through the park,
and they wanted to gather things and stay there.
And yet, we knew that, of course,
we wouldn't be able to do that.
The poem is called "Lynn Point Trail."
"That rare day, we played for real and left traces
of our walking sticks in last year's leaves.
Lynn Point Trail hit us in rushing green,
in the thick dark of Douglas fir, where death conceals
itself in blazing moss.
Leading us in the journey, our children
stomp-danced until the ferns bristled with the authority
of hooded cobras.
When they turn to us for answers,
we began to see fronds tremble with a delicate weight,
as if infinity stirred the stem.
The scattered light peopled each ravine.
We longed for woods this deep, for this glen
where you knelt to photograph a gleam inside a bridge of stone.
Was it then Missy wouldn't go on?
Our youngest girl wanted to believe home
could be this emerald grotto.
Nearby, we heard the breaking sigh of waves,
while bickering in a bird staccato,
she kept her gesture firm, though naive.
Here, we belonged.
A cuckoo's call echoed in the sun.
I, too, wish we could have lived near the tilted horizon,
close to the fluttering mat that weaves dun fly
and dune into one.
With songs for granite and bluer skies,
children gathered rain-eroded shells.
Let these rocks be eggs until the tides scorch them
or until the heart reveals at last the grace we lost."
There was one poem that I sent when people
asked me to send some poems.
And it comes from the experience of traveling out
to Wind River, Wyoming, a totally different kind of land
than what I'm familiar with.
I'm familiar with woods and lakes and a closed
horizon and heavy clouds.
And out on the Wind River Reservation,
it's very much like this, where you can see mountains
in the distance.
And you can see all kinds of levels of land.
And while we were out there at a place
called Dinwoody, it's called, near a place that's
called The Lake That Roars, there were some women that
came to visit or stop and chat with my husband and I.
And they were magnificent-looking women,
I thought.
They were in their 50s.
And they were on horses, on horseback.
And they had this sort of presence about them
that made me feel very happy to meet them and to watch them.
And after they had left, my husband
started telling me how they were related to one of his relatives
and the kind of life that they had lived.
And that people didn't always treasure sisters
who lived very close to their mother
and who managed to help her raise her cattle, who
would have been thought in some contexts,
I guess, as old maids.
But they were really inspiring, I thought.
And so I wrote a poem for them and for their relative.
And it's called "Home Before Dark."
And it incorporates a bit of the legend of the place.
There are stories in that area about a white buffalo who
was being chased by Shoshones and went up
into this lake area.
And he took his herd out onto the ice.
And when he was driven out onto the ice,
the weight of the herd on the ice
caused them all to fall under the water.
And they disappeared.
But the Shoshones say that that buffalo bull is still there,
because you can still hear it bellowing
at times in those canyons.
The poem "Home Before Dark."
"From mountain ridges west, a reluctant sun
alarms clouds to the east, giving them the salmon tint
of dawn long before its due.
Other clouds crop indigo in distant canyons.
Crowheart Butte floats in this last light
as two Shoshone women gallop home before dark.
Rain sharpens the wind blending the smell of damp Earth
and sagebrush with the sound of their sorrel horses.
Sunlight on the brims of their cowboy hats,
these sisters, close to 50, ride joyously
over this land of 1,000 levels.
Beaded roses flashing from their buckles, they leap wagon ruts,
trot over the plateau.
Some folks call them backward, say they wear shawls in town,
herd livestock for their mother, tan hides and never married.
Clouds group behind them over Black Mountain.
The women head for a southerly range,
away from the Lake That Roars, where Shoshone warriors once
hunted a buffalo bull and his herd.
White as a glacier and twice as mean, he thundered on to ice,
his herd right behind.
Snow crust enveloping their heavy size, they went down.
Since then, the bull bellows for revenge.
Some say it's only wind through canyons.
But others tell of men who've tasted forbidden meat
and changed to shaggy heads.
Clouds stamp out ledges and ravines,
careen closer, hiding the more difficult terrain.
Now one shadow moving toward the timberline,
these women hurry on.
Behind them, on Black Mountain, snow in every crevice
brilliant as a cry."
I was very interested in the title of this series, Poetics
and Politics.
And I thought, perhaps I should put all my poems
that are political toward one section
and then put the other poems in another section.
And then I realized that all poems are political.
And so some you may hear are more political than others.
But I'm building up to that.
[LAUGHTER]
Making friends.
OK.
This next poem is about my son.
And he's about 17 now.
But when he was a bit younger, he
wanted to go across country with a group of people
from Ireland, some young men who came over from Ireland,
to get some relief from the kinds of encounters
that they were having there.
And he went across to California over to the--
I think it's one of those large parks just north of Los
Angeles.
And it was my first experience in having
him say, I'm taking off, and I'm going
to be gone for a long time, and I'll see you around, Ma.
And so I had to get used to the fact that he was growing up,
and I had to let him go.
And we have a saying at home that my father often
reminded me, and I remind my children,
is that our real parents are the Earth and sky.
And that I am just helping the Earth along.
And their father's just helping the sky along.
And so in this poem, I allow myself to find
some comfort in that process.
It's called "Letting Go."
"Under blue dome, where mountain spirits wander,
he curls in a green bedroll, listening, listening,
13 years old.
When the tent flap flutters, he remembers TJ stuffing GORP
into his backpack, the grizzlies snorting all night long
through their camp in Sequoia, until the dawn ranger reported,
bear disturbance.
No one injured.
In a wind-swollen flash of sparks and ash,
I hope he hears a mountain spirit dancing nearby,
her stony breath pressing him as much as the womanly night.
I had to let him go, my gangly eagle child, struggling
to ride currents of life's uplifting wind.
Yet, then, as now and always, when pines mimic ocean swells,
I want his radiant childhood to carry him back to me
like phosphorus returning to a warm southern sea.
Even though night's rapture grows between us,
each time he telephones, distant as my own myth of mountains,
I listen for the shift in tone that tells me
he's encountered his true mother.
At daybreak, her iridescent song drifts from a canyon
hidden in our dreams.
And we seem to rise from our own power,
so skilled is her vision.
I had to let him go, encounter his true father in rings
of even star shine and boulders.
Perched on a limb of a salt-rimmed tree,
watching the heavy sea brighten as twilight grows,
I hope he'll learn manhood needs both action and repose.
How I long to save him from the miseries of war.
Enough have died so far in this quest for empire.
His true parents strengthen his willingness to love.
His high-strung mirth in the boardwalk's glare.
His dragging TJ from the undertow.
Cicadas flutter their flimsy but persistent wings
until the buzzsaw of their passion stings July heat.
As storm clouds rise and rains pummel oaks,
I notice in a lightning flash the road's gone thin.
Suffering this sea change, I peek again
from the kitchen window.
Every light is on, and every curtain opened."
One of those things that many Native people have in common
is the kind of foods that we grow and care about.
And as much as I can, wherever I am, I try to like to grow corn,
and if possible, beans and squash and maybe
a few other things also.
And sometimes I'm real successful,
and sometimes I'm not real successful.
But the thing that's amazing about corn if you think of it
is that it creates so much of itself
that it's one of those food crops
that enables us to have a democracy.
Because it creates so many seeds from itself that
it offers us an abundance of food.
And so I like to think of that, and I like to think of the fact
that it's male and female.
So that when you go out into a cornfield in mid-summer,
think of all the energies that are
moving through the cornfield between the male
and female corn.
You can kind of feel it sometimes.
So I wrote a poem.
It's like a song, called "Praising Corn."
"Green spiral meeting summer sun.
Green vertigo unwinding from the ground.
Green shoot like a tongue, tasting Earth and rain.
Mirror of our movement, swirling like water down a drain.
Long leaves flashing big as banners, a string of dewdrops
rippling to the centers.
Young men with diamond cuffs and open arms whose headdresses
toss in wind and sun like ones accustomed to dance and drum.
You've garnered the sun's flowers in your leaves.
We hoe and hoe, tear away weeds.
You soak up rain.
Toss your pollen seven rows.
Young women catch it, grow all in a season,
ready to give at the height of summer, ready to be cut down
when night hurls meteors and nighthawks journey south.
Thundering and tumbling under gunpowder clouds.
Beautiful spirits' corn, because of you, we live."
This next poem came from reading a work by a woman named
Rigoberta Menchu.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with it.
And I was very struck by the kinds of experiences
that she had and the willingness that she
had to speak about them and to share them with people.
And one of the things that really
struck me was when she said she wanted to be acknowledged
as a human being, I thought that it
was a very long kind of a process, beginning,
if you think, with Columbus, for Native peoples to be recognized
as human beings.
And I felt a very strong connection
to the people in Guatemala and wrote
a poem that uses some of the mythology
from down there to talk about the connections
that we have to the struggle going on
for the people, the Indian people all up
and down this continent, but particularly in Guatemala.
And she said, I fight so that they will recognize me
and treat me like a human being.
And the poem is called "Acknowledgment."
"Listen, for the Lord of the Near and Close
comes to make you see in steam rising from coffee,
smoke from bodies burning in Panzos.
Sometime he'll have you taste in your chocolate bars
that bitterness children carry when they dare not
bury their bludgeoned mothers.
On the backs of owls, Izquic, Woman's Blood,
flew out of smoldering hells, carrying
within her twins who restored freedom
to those sunlit mountains.
Sometimes she'll have you smell in the red and fragrant flowers
the hearts of boy soldiers hanging in trees.
Where is the mirror that makes all things shine?
The night winds, my lord.
He cleans the bodies flung in ravines and comforts
aching women standing before their fragile fires.
His breath's a spiral, wide as this galaxy,
where nothing is obscured.
Obsidian Butterfly will force you
to see how children sleep in a cardboard box year
after tremulous year.
In the span of their hands, onions, gruel, and a dangerous
abyss for the people of this sun.
In clouds and mist, their suffering moves.
Something comes to wake you.
Something comes without faltering.
Can you feel it in the twilight, in your fruits
and in your cheeses, in your signatures?
The gods and goddesses are talking together,
scanning dumpsters and smog, nuclear playgrounds.
They soothe cholera-stricken geese
and the broken feet of coyotes.
In their diminishing forests they
meet, counting the heartbeats it will
take to make each face sublime.
Will you acknowledge the love and faith
of our restless Earth?
Or will you claim the sufferings too far south
while your mouth samples and measures,
calls everything tangible?
Through darkness, through night, our suffering moves.
A slow quake in the chest, a sigh.
No food, and the body will eat itself.
Some of you bluster and do not believe we
have cut the heart of the sky.
You give gasoline to the lords of your death.
Spoon out the sugar, ignoring its tears."
I guess in looking at that poem, the you in the poem
was, of course, for the people who have that kind of control
and who don't recognize those kinds of connections
that we all have to one another, the relationships that we
have to one another.
I think I'll read another sort of a shorter poem.
I lived a lot of my life in a lot of anger
and a lot of despair.
And I realized at a certain point
that I had to let a lot of that go and trust in things.
And there was one moment when that started to happen.
And it was down here in this area in the Southwest.
I was at Santa Fe, and I had this incredible experience
of just sleeping under a full moon.
And all of a sudden, I felt that the moon was watching me,
that the moon and I were somehow talking.
And I really couldn't quite understand it.
And maybe it was a moment of insanity, which I treasure.
[LAUGHTER]
I think we need moments of insanity
like that that we'd really treasure.
Maybe that's the kind of reality that we need to come back to.
But that kind of moment gave me a lot
of connection to feeling free of despair for a very long time.
I don't think I felt the kind of despair I once felt since then.
And when I got back home, I thought of it.
And I thought I should remember this experience.
And so I wrote a poem.
And this is for all of you who might feel that kind of sense
of despair and hope that you can let it go and find
some connections out there in the world in the Earth and sky.
It's called "No Longer."
"I no longer fear the firestorm, despair.
Green Earth has coaxed my soul over a blue bridge
of forget-me-nots into her hollow of oak leaves, lilies.
Now each creek I cross balances dark and day, as birds
give no thought to each wing's weight, but fly, singing.
I no longer expect the firestorm, despair,
to sear the ground I grow on.
Horns of sumac have broken my blindness.
Thunder's taste glitters on my lips.
The moon urges, my blood roots burgeoning.
Her fierce song cools this light I feed on.
Together, we travel this river of fervid stars."
I think what I'll do is to read another poem
about my experiences traveling.
I had the opportunity to go to China a few years ago in '89,
just the year before Tiananmen Square happened.
And I felt there was a real strong connection
to the kinds of writers that I'd met in China
and to just the experience of being
an Indian person in China.
I felt a connection to a number of the writers there.
Some of them were Chinese, and some of them were Tibetan.
And we went over to Chengdu and traveled all through China.
The conference was in Chengdu, which
is in a marvelous area where there
are very tall mountains, very pointed kinds of mountains,
very green mountains.
And it was a beautiful experience.
And I still have a feeling of connectedness
sometimes when I think of those people and wonder how they are.
I think we get images in the air and from the Earth that
come to us.
And I think that's our way of really communicating
with one another.
But we're taught not to pay attention to those things.
We're spacing out or daydreaming or whatever.
But I like to pay attention to that.
So this is a poem for those writers
that I had met over there.
And it's called "Traveling."
If you're not familiar with some of the Chinese writers,
there's one that I mentioned, a poet
named Du Fu, who lived in what is called the City of Brocade.
And he was a very well-known poet.
His whole family comes from a series
of very well-known, famous poets.
But he met ill favor with the court and, of course,
was sent out exile and traveled for a very long time
throughout China and wrote a lot of his poems
while he was traveling.
The poem is called "Traveling."
"The moon on the rim of my world skims westward
over ripples of cirrus haze.
It is the orange sail of a junk I follow,
traveling in indigo twilight.
Do you know in order to sleep, I read Tibetan poetry,
Chinese history.
The xun wavers in unfamiliar air.
Quicksilver above the gearing down
of trucks leaving the nearby freeway.
Sometimes, when I lift the lid of my cup,
tea leaves catch my heart in hidden currents.
And I remember orchid petals, trembling
in the teahouse of Du Fu in his City of Brocade.
He knew what strengths arrive with exile.
Sometimes those lagoons inundate my daily life.
And I wait, while ripples of jade surge
against my shoulders.
I wait while the mountains of Leshan
unravel roads around the horizon of my afternoon.
We travel with common heartbeats now, though half a world away.
You, too, write toward dawn alone.
Does someone watch you from beyond
for that single indiscretion?
Tiptoeing across tightropes of ideology,
carrying only the asylum of my words, I want to reach you.
But I cannot make them minarets or gorges,
breath crystals drifting in an azure sky,
the way your native tongue looks to me on paper.
You said a gold thread binds all things together.
Can I find it here?
Sometimes I long for sweet sour carp and garlic shoots.
Do you ever scour the underground
for books on Indian nations beyond your Eastern Sea?
True to the drum and bell sound of my soul,
I dance these pictures into wind and send them
on the backs of ocean waves.
Because I wanted you to know, every now and then,
I cannot sleep until I touch my fingers to the Earth to feel
if you're still rising on the other side."
For those of you who might not know that,
it's very risky to be an artist in China.
Because the country swings so radically
between being open to Western influence and being shut.
And one of the writers before we left
recognized that they were at the point
when it would shut down and try to get rid
of Western influences.
And he was a very brave man who had spent probably
about 29 years in prison for his writing.
And again, then, at this time he had come out
to write and to be recognized as a writer.
And the writers who write and are
interested in Western literature and English and the kinds
of things that we were discussing
could have also been considered decadent again and sent back
to prison.
So I admired their willingness to continue
with their art in spite of such tremendous, potentially
frightening kinds of obstacles.
Well, I don't know if you're familiar, perhaps,
with large bodies of water.
Are there lakes here?
[LAUGHTER]
Do you have lakes?
No?
Well, of course, I live near the Great Lakes,
or that's where my people are from is near the Great Lakes.
And we have very large bodies of water.
And I thought that I ought to send you
some images of the great bodies of water and the trees
and the birds and the storms.
I understand you do have tremendously heavy storms
in the summer.
So this is about two very large fronts meeting one another
over the water.
And it was kind of an incredible experience to watch them
and to feel that they were rumbling and talking
to one another.
And you could see them kind of going along.
And then here we were on kind of the Earth.
And then, of course, you knew that there
were other things going on underneath the water,
underneath the land.
So this is about a place called Chequamegon Bay.
If you're ever up near northern Wisconsin,
you might want to go up there, because it's
a very beautiful place.
And the poem is called "Of Light, Water, and Gathered
Dust."
"Above Chequamegon Bay, two immense assemblies
of summer clouds collide, flare with messages,
and rumble their rejection.
With massive strides, they edge each other, bunch-backed
by a load-- cauliflower.
The eastern front drives daggers of rain
into the dove gray water between them.
The western fliers snap green whips,
forcing cruise ships home.
When the lightning flashes, you name
a shore hovering in midair.
Other islands out there are shrewd as submerging monsters,
eyes flickering in the dusk.
The gulls' transparent cries are blown along a low cliff.
Wings arrive from wind.
They read it, then balance again,
swinging like pendants beyond us.
Crickets resist the wind and sing.
Orange and red lightning explodes in dizzy loops.
Two flashes zig from top down cloud.
The bay surges over rocks, its fish, aware of an upper world.
Look, I say, in that flash.
The oak grove we walked through last spring.
Crickets approve, sing louder than before.
As shreds of cauliflower fall earthward,
house lights on Madeleine Island dim.
Above the scattering clouds, Jupiter
close as the motel door, and the Milky Way,
no longer remote, but bright as your laughter in the dark.
The footprints of souls who walked this Earth plane
whirl around us, through us, beyond us, into us.
Born of light, water, and gathered dust,
we grope for one another's hand and trust the galaxy's
embrace as leaves trust air, as thunder its cloud.
You throw your cigarette over the rail.
It grows a tail and travels through a slow glowing arc.
For that moment, even crickets pause."
Well, I'm going to read another political poem.
I don't know if you're familiar with the things that
are going on in northern Wisconsin,
the issue of Indian treaty rights
and the question of the development of mines.
There is a large copper deposit in northern Wisconsin.
And for a while, what stopped Anaconda Mining out
of Australia, a multinational mining corporation,
was nine people on the Mole Lake Reservation
up in northern Wisconsin who claimed
that any kind of mining development
needed to recognize that the Indian people
in northern Wisconsin had reserve rights.
And there have been tremendous encounters
over the last several years between the Indian spear
fishermen who have gone out and exercised
those rights to spear on the lakes and organizations that
claim to--
they claim that they need to have
equal rights for all Americans.
But their major interest is, of course,
to support the mining interests and to prevent Indians
from spear fishing, from exercising their rights.
So the spear fishing controversy is not necessarily
one about fish.
It's really about the rights of Indian people,
the questions that they have over the environmental safety,
how it will affect them and the water,
and the development, the process of development
that could go on and really rip up
the northern woods in Wisconsin all across the northern area.
And when I had thought of these things
and was taking a course--
I took a course with a professor from Chile
whose name is Hernan Vidal.
And he showed me a number of things
to think about in terms of the connections
between northern Wisconsin and the kinds of mining that
had gone on in Chile.
And so this poem was written for him.
And it kind of moves around, I guess.
But one of the things that started
me thinking about it is that in one
of the places in northern Wisconsin in a pizza parlor
there was a sign posted for the first annual Indian shoot,
to think of how a person could kill off an Indian lawyer
and get 100 points, shoot an Indian teacher
and get another couple of hundred points.
And so there was a whole listing of this kind of racism
that was posted throughout the area.
And that's one example of how sad that area had become.
Fortunately, there is a restraining order
that just came down last fall, so that the people who
are in those organizations are no longer allowed
to interfere with Indian spear fishermen and women out
on the lakes.
So it will start when I get back.
In March, they'll go out on the lakes,
start going on the lakes.
And hopefully, the restraining order will hold.
This poem is called "Preguntas," which means questions.
"You said one time, offhandedly, your bones
contain your people's history.
Professor, no one wrote it down.
Did you know in my home state--
[AUDIO OUT] --the bones in my fingers
and scruffed them across the sign.
It is not the first, the right finger bone sang.
It has never been annual, the left ones added.
Do I look like a deer to you, professor,
or a quail preening in the back corner of the room
against the wall and window?
I warble to the air of the classroom, OK, OK.
So I'll be a bird, la guarda barranca,
who lives in these ravines on the underside
of American history.
From these thickets in the shadow of his years,
my father sits at our table near the window telling stories.
The west wind knew how to listen,
and sometimes sends his voice back to me
whenever my blood falters.
I welcomed his singing in the dark, his sobbing
in the dark, paralyzed at times in his struggle
against the daily snare of being declared worthless.
Because of him, I know my flesh is corn come from Earth.
Because of him, I know my body is a hologram
of all that is and ever was.
What fear drives them, professor?
What makes them want to annihilate these memories
of our bones and blood?
Bones breaking silence, speak.
Words finding wings, fly.
Wings bringing clouds, whirl.
Clouds bearing rain, fall on those fields
that uphold justice.
They want hurt and rage to cement our bones,
so we can't dance by them.
They want us drunk and armed whenever we
ride across northern Wisconsin.
Then they'll call us terrorists, savages, call newsmen
into see our hides tacked to garage doors,
because we question the word civilized openly
against this treeless horizon, because we declare ourselves
original human beings.
Professor, sometimes across your face
floats a cloud of loneliness and loss,
of solidarity with those who suffer.
You draw a schema on the blackboard
to reveal the wheel of fragments in which we live.
Although you clearly show us contradictions
like gears grinding every one of us into sand,
the schema have not taught me as much
as the sundown cloud across your face when you speak of justice.
You have helped me understand their fear of the dark
is not my identity.
Their Indian shoot doesn't create wiggle room
for a few more fish.
It's not about fish, but fake blue lakes.
Not about trees, but copper.
Sometimes the wind brings to my window
my father's voice with the voices of others.
Akwesasne, Tlaltelolco, Lac du Flambeau, El Salvador.
Because of you, I trust bones breaking silence will speak.
Words finding wings will fly.
Wings bringing clouds will whirl.
And whirling clouds filled with oblique rain
will fall on those fields that answer
these questions of justice."
So-- thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
So you can feel real happy about the rain, you know.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll read just a few more poems.
Let's see.
OK.
I'm going to read another poem once again.
There's two more that I'd like to share with you.
One of them is a fairly recent poem.
And it's about just growing up in a city
and trying to figure out about what it meant to--
what do they call that sort of consciousness
where your mind is colonized, where
you feel like you're one person in one situation.
And then in another way, you have to be someone else.
How in some ways, many of us have had to live in the city
and not really reveal, in some ways, who we were.
And so the poem is called "Our Different Story."
"After my father returned from the war, he gave each of us
a mask to wear, like the one his mother gave him made of gauze.
Wear this, he said, so they won't
see that you belong to a different story.
When you enter their world, what they do won't hurt so much.
We wore the flimsy gauze that smelled like a dusty curtain.
It tickled our ears, ruffled over our arms,
and draped down our backs like a bride's long veil.
It's moiré patterns dazzled our sleep.
But we still lifted it from our faces
to dance inside our different story.
When we got hurt or grew afraid, we chided each other.
You don't wear it right.
We never thought its whisper could run around
our heads for years.
Do you hear it muttering now, my sisters?
We hugged each other when it grew too tight against our eyes
like a sour bandage.
We squinted past its mottled light at dark green fields
beyond its threshold.
Boyfriends who refuse to wear it had
it stapled on their faces in places
called prison or boarding school.
Inez told father the gauze was cutting us whenever we tried
to rip it from our foreheads.
But father's mask by then became the cast of light in winter.
He couldn't remember the day his mother gave him his.
He felt our pain, but could not stop
what had become its steady hum.
Do you hear it now, my sisters, that television
in a far-off room?
I find it fluttering over me at times,
like those nights my sister threw a sheet high
as the stucco ceiling.
It's cool nap skipped down my face, my thighs.
If I could lie still long enough,
I'd hear the sound of dying.
When I walked highways in despair,
I heard the leaves applauding where its edges frayed
and my face was undisguised.
My children find gauze everywhere they go.
One in their games had mica woven in the warp.
It's transparent lace can constrain the heart.
They say, it's just a sparkler they
can light and watch be spent.
I cannot stop its pattern from traveling up their arms.
I tell you, sisters, I'm afraid they
will grow used to the same cuts, more fond of their own wounds
than lust or love.
Father cannot help us now.
In our time, we have to struggle from these wrappings, cocoons
in need of cracking, tougher on breasts than corsets,
hotter at times than a cast, filled
with a multitude of insufferable itches.
I danced around the dumpster until mine ripped,
and the story bloomed above me in the dark.
Only then could I recognize the moon.
I plan to pry apart the glint inside each wave
and ask the sun to melt the remnants of this haze
around me.
Then I hope the Earth will stun me with her power.
And I'll gaze at each of you free of its distortions.
Remember, my sisters, the sea and the sky,
the mountains and hollows.
Wait for us to break loose and follow that music
we hear, music that urges us to move
into the mysteries of our America.
Come join me."
And you have cedar trees here, right?
Good.
[LAUGHTER]
There's a wonderful little cedar tree up in northern Minnesota.
And this is the last poem that I'll read.
But it's a wonderful little cedar tree.
It must be about over 150 years old.
And it's out on the middle of a rocky cliff.
But the cliff itself is in the water.
So it looks as if the tree is out surrounded
by the rest of Lake Superior.
And it's a very beautiful and strong spirit.
And they call it the Little Spirit Cedar Tree,
because it's been there for so long.
And people go and talk to it and find a connection to that area.
And so I thought what it would be
like to have been a tree like that.
I think the trees try to talk to us.
And we need to try to talk to them.
And I just felt a connection with it.
So I thought I'd like to read this last poem.
It's called "You Call Me Less Than All I Am."
"For ages and ages, under clear summer nights,
I bridged wind and stars.
See how I live.
Every bit of bark, every limb and flat leaf
explores a different span.
My canopy of edges nourished the origins
of your blood, your brooding.
Call me a cedar growing from rocks.
Call me the record of Earth's blessing.
Watch me curve, coil, throw a sinewy hook.
Then come murmur with me.
Let go the rigid patterns of streets and submarines.
My resin scents the Earth as I grope through the velvet
warmth of dirt just beyond your reach,
just in need of your touch.
My creators remind me of my girth.
My leaves stop stars before your eyes.
When the wind fills me, the music I
am clings to every branch.
Through me, see the processions of stars,
the spiral dance of Earth.
Through me, feel your backbone and your worth.
What shelter without my green youth.
My spirit always faces south and yours.
When I creak, I offer my home to katies that did,
to katies that didn't.
And you?"
OK, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]