"Goi-O-Guen"

They haven’t plowed the circle in Schiller Park
but I am walking the path sunk in snow
by others, humans, dogs, the grey-hoodie guy
behind me with an aging beagle, walking round
and round together. Schiller said joy is the wheel
that drives everything, but he also said poor
suffering masses, so I say rage is the fire
burning in the furnace of our bodies, we go
round and round looking for justice, our feet
melting through ice, snow, down to asphalt
road bed, no rest, my bare feet dug into the dirt
overgrown logging road by the river, the way
to the shallow ford where my people settled,
a deep trace made by other people warred on,
displaced by force, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek.
Justice means knowing what’s underneath.
At the neighborhood mart, the cashier admires
my necklace as she rings me up, dragonfly,
green fire fanning its spark above the river,
and dangles her charm, wolf clan, she says,
a silvered sliver of the past she’s still living.
The past is not the past. Down New York 90,
farmers post No Sovereign Nation two miles
from Goi-O-Guen, Cayuga Castle, burned
in 1779 by U.S. troops, already town destroyers,
the village now a pasture domed with snow.
The beginning of justice is to know what is
underneath.

For more on the history underneath,
go to:
http://sullivanclinton.com/
and
http://www.native-languages.org/cayuga_culture.html

Also on this day in 1915, the U.S. House of Representatives denied
women the right to vote. But in the Central New York area, women's
power in continuing Native nations had long been documented by
Syracuse historian Matilda Joslyn Gage:
http://www.matildajoslyngage.org/


Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Next"

What keeps us here, knowing we’re going to die?
At ninety-five, Lethean said to know what happens
next. Good enough reason to watch reality TV—
will Nina Flowers ever win?—or go for a walk
and write down I saw the wind’s legerdemain
pull a veil of snow out of thin cold air and disappear
its gauze in one breath, and I saw ice twisted
like plastic bags around bush branches, and ice
stalactites bigger than my arm plunged like spears
into the ground and broken, flung like toppled gods.
Soon all of this will melt away, forever gone,
and reveal underneath another story waiting to be
found, Mama on her hands and knees in the spring
woods, digging in the dead leaves to fold back
the ground, and show me a green triangle of leaf,
a strange budvase of blossom, its small pursed
lips, its purple-freckled brown skin. Nothing said
about my body, you understand, but she did show
me that. There, another story told, twice-told
reason enough to walk around and ask what will
happen next?


Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Red-Shifting”

Starry spirals float on the TV screen, snowflake
galaxies telescoped back in time, so our memory
is now thirteen billion years old, burning, not
melting, starry campion flowers in the sun. Where
was that? By the cold green creek, petals sparkling
in sand, in limestone bluffs, detritus of diatoms,
crinoid sea-lilies, five-armed feather-stars,
calcified memory blooming deep inside the rock
the boys and I jumped off of into a swimming
hole that time needed five hundred million years
to make so the creek could flow. How I wish
I could step my bare feet into that water again.
Carrying memory like trying to pick water up
out of the creek, losing more than I get to keep.
Lonely for the dead, those I can no longer touch,
those alive but older, their young selves running
through my brain’s labyrinth, like Miz Venola
remembered me at one-day-old, my tiny fingers
scratching at my face, grasping at whose hands?
Mama’s white, Laura’s dark, stark history, centuries
to pull myself up to, into, now we call it the struggle
to know what we are born into. When they died,
their me ceased to exist, leaving me to this task,
trying to hold onto each minute of new memory
until my red neuron stars can filament finger
millions, some new connection with the past,
ignition, yes, it is just us and neurogenesis, red-
shifting forward toward multiple possible eternity.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"The New Commuter Wars"

The snow flies up here! she says. White
moths sputtering up, and black crows
storming down past the porch windows.
We’re not up so high, enough to see over
the twilit valley, how the night lights blink
like computer red LEDS so visitors say Oh!
now they see that Syracuse really is a city.
How high up do you have to be to see
what’s happening? The eye is not enough.
Media moguls hand us plastic 3-D glasses
and move the earth wars to another planet,
turn the people blue, and burn beauty in,
the mesmerizing ashes drift, delicate moths
onto our hands as we sit in the front row,
perhaps next to a soldier living secret
in this city, mornings he commutes to war
to fly the unmanned death-reaper drone,
and the U.S. Army says just doing his job.
That’s a lie, he’s making nothing people use,
his techno game hands jerking the joystick,
his well-fledged eyes darting to kill a target
on the screen between him and the mountain
valley where later ashes fall like snow
on a shattered house, a dozen people dead,
on the blood and guts of the ugly truth.

U.S. war on Afghanistan now means “drone” planes being flown 7500 miles away by remote control, out of the airport of the town where I live, by National Guard soldiers who stay in their hometown and commute to war. The Army is aggressively recruiting a younger generation who don’t need to have experience as real-time pilots because they have grown up playing video games on screen with a “joystick,” the same used to operate “The Reaper.”For more info:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/12/national_guardsmen_in_syracuse.html
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/12/fearing_new_threats_drone_crew.html

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010