Windhorse

Title: Little Blue Flying Horse by Pop Chalee --Native American artist-- painting on wall of the New Mexico Statehouse


I Ride a Windhorse Across the Sky of Change

An enormous full moon
demands I look up from headlights and
street crossings to acknowledge
our wild beginnings.

I see that our Animal ancestors paused
as they masked themselves as humans,
then stood on two legs to dance together,
no longer recognizable to themselves as Bear, Monkey,
Tiger, Coyote, Turtle, Deer, Snake, Horse, Bird......

They made an evolutionary leap of faith,
Were not able to take off their disguises,
nor return to walking on four legs or flying.

They are mourning their choice, their loss of
connection to the high, dry wild and wetland, forests,
no longer part of their lives.

They relate their stories to each other while dancing,
never stopping to remove their too human faces.
Perhaps the Creator no longer recognizes them,
as they no longer recognize themselves.

Now they dream of liberation through technology,
to move into outer space star worlds,
liberated from their earth animal nature,
encapsuled weightless in a spaceship box,
looking from control panels
into the blackness of passing stars.

The dance goes on and on.
Molecules freeze into passages of unwritten books.
We will only read the lines much later when
the remains of this civilization, this story,
lie buried beneath ash and earth.

Then, as before,
At the openings of dark earth tunnels,
under cliff outcroppings, shelters, past and future,
homecomers from that outer spacebox
will put on animal masks,
pick up the drum and dance Bear, Monkey, Snake
Bird, Coyote, Tiger, Deer, Horse
back from oblivion.

copyright Mitzi Linn, 1997