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[amuse]

This was my first coming-of-age poem. Thought I'd share this entry from another site:

I'm putting "Pieces of Eight" - my second chapbook together - and found a poem I wrote when I was - wow! Doing the math, it was half my life ago. Anyway...there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on California's Native Americans & missions. I never finished it - started to cry (which really suprised me) as I read the first paragraph. Wrote this. Was in May (I think) '87. The middle has changed over the years, partly because I threw away all my poems around 13 years ago, and couldn't remember it exactly. So it's become a little organic as a result:


Rape

Great Spirit,
Show me how to
Love your
Earth, how to
Kill the
Buffalo and
Do it
Kindly. But

The mission
Bells
Ring.

We offer thanks and prayers
To Little Bear and
Dance wildly
For rain;
My love watches and waits for me.

But the
Mission bells
Ring.

I ask the
Stars to
Teach me
Well, and to
Let the
Wisdom of my
Ancestors
Live forever.

And I
Sing as I
Ride through the
Wind in the
Tall grass,
Grateful for this wide land and
Wider sky -
My spirit is fed
By the larger
One
Above.

But somewhere
Ahead, in
Distance and time,
I hear a
Different Sound.

And the
Mission bells
Ring.

[Isagel]

I think it´s beautiful. The sadness , prehaps an echo of your sadness when you read the articel, is hinted but not spelled right out. It creates a feeling of melancholy and loss which feels opure and fresh. It´s hard to write about things lost without being sentimental, especially when you are so young.

[amuse]

thank you...it was hard to take care of for years, when i tried to remember it and rewrite the middle (the part i forgot most - it was one of 300 i'd thrown away & remembered later); at one point i named it "tears" because i couldn't write it without crying.
and i could almost hear the echo of lost voices when i wrote, like when you move into a new place and the rooms echo, except in this case it was the wide, beloved land...

it was published in my college's literary magazine a couple of years ago. i'd never read my stuff in public before, and didn't at the reading that followed. kind of wished i had. it felt like i had lived before when i wrote this, it was my first "memory" of such...it washed over me, i wish i had voiced that waterfall...