The first time I saw it
I knew that hand
we belong to,
the deep shining color of Missa Sipokna,
Mississippi,
Old River we called the Long Person,
and the mica hand
our people heated
to pass over the bodies of the ailing.
It is our mineral history
coming, as we do,
from this earth.
Oh, dark shining. My beautiful people,
perhaps, like me, somewhere inside
you remember our history,
you remember the water, even the terror
when our horses had to break through its freezing skin
to swim that dark cold river of memory,
your hands holding the tail of a swimming horse
as it passed through mortal danger.
How many worlds have slid away
the way one skin does from another
in this mineral we loved,
some of us walking into another side of creation,
some arriving stripped down
to the elemental body of history.
Still, I have emerged from time
with the old worlds at that bottom land
and my blood runs so like the gleaming
waters, the sap of trees,
and still, after all these years, all our histories,
I am ready to be pulled up from old river,
given a blanket, given a hand, the human warmth
of a shining hand. I need you
to hold me, touch me, bring me to the surface,
so come find me, you prayers of my old ones
arriving from the unknown and barely remembered places
of the past.