Lessons of the land

Here’s a poem in honor of last Sunday’s 100 Thousand Poets for Change, and for this coming Saturday’s Indigenous People’s Day at Wakamatsu Farm. The Birds of a Feather exhibition was at Arts and Culture El Dorado’s Confidence Firehouse Gallery last spring; photo is Jaime Lanouette’s “First Attempt”:

Birds of a Feather

Native California Indian art exhibition

This old fire-hall, scaffolded now –

can’t ivy hold mortared bricks together?

Hall built on ancestral Nisenan lands –

valley oak and cottonwood, sedges, willow.

Post-Contact tech plays in and out of TEK –

traditional ecological knowledge.

White gallery walls frame digital birds

in primary feather colors. Red, black, yellow.

Dance regalia: berries of toyon & madrone,

pine nuts, mallard scalp, river clam shells.

See how everything is bound together,

how nothing goes to waste.

Here, redwing and meadowlark touch bills –

whose spring song is sweeter?

Birds of a tribe, a range, a feather –

precarious as a people in this new world.

Perched on its talons, watcher-hawk

appraises me with its potent eye.

They say deer sinew is strong as fiberglass,

translucent with an ageless amber shine.

How everything is bound together,

how nothing goes to waste.

Willow, cotton, dogbane – is it a snowshoe

or cradleboard bearing us into bright unknowns?

~ Taylor Graham