We bent the branches of trees
to show our way through the forest.
No foreign man with firearms
could know how to find
that certain bend,
the young and yielding tree
of our native past, so kindly
shared with other tribes,
the trees so young
yet touched in such a way
that they would bend along each path,
and they remain, some of them,
infused still with the old bent,
and we know the direction
to follow.