The Death of a Tribe

[Dark Muse]

This was inspired by a news story I read in which what had once been one of the oldest still remaining tribes has become now extinct when its last surviving member died.


The Death of a Tribe

A world once held inside,
cradled through the avenues
of the mind, breathing
through memories, racing
across the body's planes.

So fragile an existence
for a nation contained
within this solitary vessel,
all their knowledge, joy, and sorrows,
the many faces now dead
live solely through a lone survivor.

Vanishing as soon as the last
light darkened behind the eyes,
with no children to carry the spark
beyond she became grandmother
of a tribe, keeper of traditions
which stretch back through time.

The world could shudder and cry
at the loss, a civilization
left now only scattered bones,
gone forever a language which will
have no voice to carry its melodies.

How many stories now will be left
to fall away into the dust,
how soon will it be forgotten,
along the paths they once walked,
just as their footprints have
been swept away, so too will the
traces of their long yet brief
existences on this earth disappear.

[MorpheusSandman]

I really like this; it's different from your usual, more darkly romantic sensual pieces. It really tells a story with a potent and sobering sadness. I recently read Melville's Typee which really does make one wonder about the extinction of so many small societies and cultures that have existed. One wonders what they might could've taught us about life.

[Dark Muse]

Thank you, and I haven't read that one yet, but it sounds interesting, I will have to look it up sometime. It is quite awe inspiring to wonder about. I was rather efected by the news when I heard it. To think of an entire culture dying out with the death of this one woman, and all she could have taught, and her tribes history and stories, going to the grave with her.

[Bar22do]

The most poignant is the helplessness of the facts, how sad, and that one remaining woman whose death seals the death of a rich tradition... You wrote it with compassion of your heart, while also with sensible restraint, for me it takes an universal meaning...

I do not know exactly why your poem reminded me of Carlos Drummond's desolation when he wrote (I think this is Mark Strand's translation but I am not sure):

"Alone in the dark
like a wild animal,
without tradition,
without a naked wall
to lean against,
without a black horse
that flees galloping,
you march, José!
José, where to?"


Perhaps, because "our" bellicose, arrogant and rather superficial civilization is dying too, though one wonders if in this case it is not something to look forward to... (in the hope that what comes next will comply a trifle better with the sacredness of life)

Thank you Dark.