Long Time Back

[I have this card with the name of the artist somewhere in this house, but cant lay my fingers on it right now...will look for it and credit the artist ASAP]


Kerry's intriguing challenge at Real Toads is to write a poem in the tradition of oral poetry. Cool! She suggested we try to embody the culture that exists where we live. Of course the culture that feels even closer to me than my own is our Nuu Chah Nulth First Nations, on the West Coast. I heard many of the Old Ones speak in my years working among them. I remember going home on the boat after work one afternoon and the elder who was sitting beside me pointed to a long peninsula of land jutting out into the bay, prime real estate these days. "My great-grandfather was given a barrel of molasses for that land," she told me.


Long time back, 
my grandfather say,
what is water now
up north
was covered by thick ice,
like a land bridge,
and The People came walking,
wrapped in fur, 
across the Russian steppes,
and over the  Bering  Sea.
They met with Our People,
who were Walking Up
in search of food. 


Those were the days
when the trees 
and the animals
spoke to people,
and all lived
within the sacred balance
of life, days when
the Medicine Wheel turned
and turned,
and man lived 
in balance
between the earth and sky.

Long time back, 
my grandfather say,
the white lion 
and the medicine man
shared a cave together.
When the hungry season came,
the lion offered himself
so the human could eat,
and, in this way, survive
when, otherwise, man 
would have perished.
Long time back.


Long time back,
we sang to the whales
and the whales
came to us, singing.
A wild child
climbed on the big gray's back,
and her eyes spoke:
she became Chief,
in that moment.


Long time back,
trees walked across 
the forest floor
and strange spirits
murmured and whispered
in their branches.
The secrets that were revealed
in those long gone days
are remembered now
by only a few of our elders.
The language of the people
is dying with them,
along with our hopes,
along with the planet
that Younger Brother,
so rash and heedless,
takes and takes from,
giving nothing back.


Long time back, we knew
that everything we took,
we had to consider the impact
down to the seventh generation.
Older Brother has 
given warning,
but Younger Brother
looks with eyes of greed
and will not hear.


Our Old Ones tell us
that in the night
they hear 
the broken-hearted cries
of all the animals:
cougar and grizzly,
white Spirit Bear,
wolf and deer.
They are living in times 
of homelessness and hunger,
few forests left in which to hide,
flushed out onto city streets 
where they stare, terrified,
at the fast metal world  
that man has made,
a world with 
nowhere left 
to run.


The Old Ones say
they watched a mother bear 
and her hungry cubs
trailing across a clearcut,
and the Old Ones were crying
as they spoke:
"So pitiful, so pitiful."


Long time back,
the world was young
and free.
Waterfalls tumbled 
down the canyon wall,
wild rivers roared,
fish were plentiful,
and not diseased,
meat was fresh,
not full of pus and hormones,
and braves rode free
and laughing
across the prairie grass,
after the herds of buffalo.


My grandfather say,
it was always 
a good day to die,
long time back.