PLAINSGOD

Here are the plains you see from a windshield -
commerce, production, money to be made,
plenty of room to make it, to stretch out,
exploit, consume, use it or lose it.
Here are the fat calves soon fatter in the stinking lots
and made ready for vertically integrated slaughter.
Here are the metal arcs wheeling 
around green circles growing gold,
pumped fat with ammonia and diesel and brews
that twist and yellow the stems of weeds.
Here are the nodding praying mantis heads
of oil wells and the distant towers cracking
the hydrocarbon backs of Texas crude,
and the flare-off at night that must be
the signal fires of conquering armies.

Distance and space deceive,
She seems whole and protected,
like nothing we scheme can encompass 
the great spaces reeling from Her eyes.
But Her flesh is scratched and pestered by a million flies.
Her veins poked and pierced, needles by the thousands
sucking and draining and sucking.
Her long hair is shorn and She haunts
like the beautiful sunken faces
in Polish holocaust photos, gaunt in the carved gullies
and dusty creases of dried wombs and empty springs.
The life that glowed Her skin
like autumn fires after a wet summer,
that sang the curves of her gorgeous fat
thick on hills and hips and swollen in valleys
trembling milk from hidden nipples,
the life that loved Her with hooves and wings,
caressed Her skin with taut roots
toed in the pores of supple loams -
that life pales like a sun-bleached bone,
hangs on, but defiled, like a shamed-out bison cow
dehorned on a Denver cattle sale block.

It comes down to what you believe,
how your God Whose works you honor speaks
to you. Let's say that God made this prairie
and breathed into motion the dancing hoops,
each locked into each other in spinning combinations
only a Great God could wholly comprehend.
And then, stone by stone, we dismantle the whirling temple.
We don't mourn the broken rubble,
the shattered glass rainbowed in the trash,
the altars of sacrament crumbled 
with dust bowl bread and stained with bloody wine.
We don't think as we scrape and plow and pump,
as we slice and divvy up the spoils.
We don't hear the cry of roots snapping
from sod like a baby cut from a womb
or the tongues humming in the hot sun,
stacked between the racks of bones
and the stench of black rotting meat.

Tell me how unthinking before the poems of God
we can babble on with Cats and Deeres
and the grinding gear racket of drilling rigs and road graders.
Tell me how we can throw up the belching sulfur towers
and crackling wires and cower hermetic in our pathetic cells.
Tell me how before the words your God wrote
you can burn in the bladed rubble heaps
the sacred scrolls of the parchment Earth.
Tell me how we can poison life we call superfluous
and worship death with the undertakerŐs
clean white hands soft on our shoulders.
Tell me how unfeeling in the sweet flare of God's breath
we clench the gasping throat of the land
and leave Her for dead.

These are temples my friends, lost.
Sacred plains, holy robes of grass,
tatanka priests, wolf shamans and coyote acolytes.
Sandhill cranes kindle the candles of respect and remembrance.
A choir of elk bugle benedictions.
Antelope usher the wind to the holy kneeling places.
Black anvils of boiling clouds anoint your brow
with healing water. Thunders pound your ears.
You are immersed in wind and hail,
gasping for breath, rising in vortex,
riding the backs of whirlwinds
spinning black hosannas and ecstatic prayers
uttered in the mystic blue tongues of lightning.

In my hands I hold a tangle of arcs,
slivers of cedar, shards of flint,
seeds of sideoats, buffalograss stolons,
the loam of Kansas and hard clay of Texas,
valley mud from the flooding Platte,
buckskin sand from the Sandhill dunes,
a cinder ash from the chokecherry volcanoes of Cimarron,
a gray bead of buffalo wallow clay,
scurfpea pods and the black berries of buffalo currants
and crimson lemon sumac,
bison dung and pellets of elk
and the berry-soft splat of grizzly bear scat,
a caw, a cackle, a snort, a bellow,
a howl and a yip, redtail hawk screes
and the summer coos of mourning doves,
the drums of prairie chickens from the dancing grounds,
whispered smoke of sacred gray sage
from white lips pressed in blue kiss to the sky,
a moon on the running stones of Tecovas Creek,
Jupiter rising in juniper and the blue smear of stars
in a yellow rattle of mesquite pods,
the rumble of hooves and flood and thunder
and a beating heart bigger than the muscle
of a High Plains blizzard.

Each of you must fill your cupped hands
with the busted pieces you happen to find.
These will be your sacred relicts.
These will remind you of the gifts of God.
These will be the poems and yearnings and visions
you bless and wrap in a medicine pouch
and hold next to your heart like a sleeping child.
These will be the Old Ones you call Grandmother and Grandfather.
They will be the talismans that reclaim
for you the prophet's voice, the lover's touch,
the hunter's humility and the child's wonder.
They will be the broken rings God mends
into hoops and circles and dreams
and gives back to all what was taken from all.
They will be your measure of love, honor and respect,
imperfect, fallible, beautiful and worthy,
pieces of Plainsgod we use 
to restore and make whole
the holy broken-hoop temples.
Let this be so.
Amen.


© 2002 by Richard W. Todd

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