Return Me

Traipsing through sacred mountain woods, the legend of an Indian brave follows me;
whispered, repeated in mountain laurel leaves;
long before white man swept this land bone-dry, left it pleading for mercy beneath a merciless sky,
a red-skinned warrior walked these hills, strode proud, mastering inherited tribal skills
the light-skinned tribe will never know or understand.
His rituals come easy, his lessons well-honed, he knows the cry of every bird, the pulse of every stone;
his mother earth awake, alive around him, she holds him close and surrounds him
with the comfort of her leaves for cover, beneath the watchful eye of the moon, his lover.

He gave the wind a name, unspoken among his own, a name lost among his people,
and to mine forever unknown.
We used his words to name our towns, built our roads upon the pathways he traveled down
and in our haste to become civilized, we murdered and buried a civilization
at one with the earth and heavens;
we sell his image on cigarette lighters and playing cards,
a subject of political lamentations, while he subsists, relegated to a reservation
his pale-skinned tormentors set aside just for him;
and we called it progress in the process as we left them all to lay dying without pride or dignity;
we, the civilized, have yet to realize the truth: we are more savage than they.

His footfalls leave no echo, no trace of his existence within this place
or time; yet I know he was once here, an occupant of this land,
a member of these mountain woods which speak to me so openly of travels past and a history
uncaptured upon pages in a book, locked forever, a secret among these
willowy branches, sung by the babbling brook from which an Indian warrior once slaked his thirst;
here no more, he was here first.
And I can only follow with a life so hollow its purpose scatters like leaves in a nameless wind,
besieged by memories of a history past I scorn the present in a litany of cries ~
that Indian brave warrior once was I.

Oh, Spirit Guides, return me.
Return me to this sacred place, a feathered headdress around my face,
and eyes that surmise the beauty that you so graciously offered me ~
nothing taken without a giving back ~
nothing taken without a prayer of gratitude for filling my hunger, quenching my thirst,
the very cloth laid upon my back.
Spirit Guides return me,
from where I stand to where I've been, to witness again what I have seen:
to hear the cry of the crow, and listen to the thunder of the buffalo stampeding across the plain
out of sight, never to be hunted again;

Spirit Guides, to my lips bear the water,
to my hands bear the labor;
upon my body paint the blood of the slaughter of my brethren, my tribe, my earth,
avenge the rape of my daughters
and I will fight, the proud warrior I was meant to be.

Return me.