Bosque Redondo

[hack]

a circled bosque
a ring of woods
a place where old gods play

a muffled drum
a high bone flute
a quick escaping day

a drop of rain
a feathered flash
a life that's gone away

a gathered dark
a time that's past
and no one left to pray

[cogs]

i think you have a peaceful sentiment there. like a ghost memory.

[hack]

Thanks cogs,
Bosque Redondo is an example of what early Spanish settlers of the American Southwest called Apache Bosques. They were copses of woods, mostly ancient cottonwoods, incongruously scattered across the Texas plains. They each held their own little ecosystems that had evolved there as though on tiny islands. When the Spanish came they were used by Apaches, as well as other native tribes, for shelter and food. They have an even older pedigree. "Clovis" people, some of the first human inhabitants of the New World, left their distinctive worked stone points in some of these bosques, perhaps more than ten thousand years ago. The Navajo, forced to Bosque Redondo by early U.S. policy, called that place Hwalte, and remember it, to this day as a place of death. Bosque Redondo and other island oases knew older gods though, and keep their secrets even if the woods, themselves, have largely disappeared.

[Bar22do]

a fine homage to the place, to a people... sad....

[PrinceMyshkin]

Many thanks for introducing me to "bosque" and for such a nimble poem.

[Dinkleberry2010]

Quite a picturesque etching--a finely-wrought picture poem, and the last two lines cap it off--they fit perfectly. This is a well-crafted poem.

[cogs]

wouldn't it be great to unlock those secrets. it's like a doorway, shut.

[~Sophia~]

sigh. (it's a touching poem)