Songs of 7 mothers
still drift over Three Sisters
under the Full Flower Moon,
planting maize, climbing beans and winter squash.
Children still listen for their uncle’s flutes
inside boarding schools
where they’re stuffed into chairs,
away from the dugouts skimming through their veins,
taught how to hold a pen and a pencil
so they can learn how to forget
to plant their name.
Pressed into paper,
in hopes that their sap will run dry.
But the melodies ride on
above hooves of Appaloosas,
scattering white clover petals …
and light dapples off new shoots of willow trees
above the heads of the mothers song,
planting
“All Cherokee music has been made to where it resorts back to gospel, to our Creator.” Kathy Sierra