Pieces of shadow floating away – Poems by Lance Henson

In here the wind pushes against its memory
The dark trees listening

Where a psalm of witness hides….

Awakening in early morning

Something broken apart in the river
Pieces of shadow floating away

sound of an open hand moving across a
dusty brown table…

 

lonely words seeking shelter

While all the shelters are burning….

 

Autumn 20/20
from the stronghold
Oct21/02

 

 

It rains….inside the air that is folded toward it….it sounds its knowing making the streets glisten and the fields open their coats
and the birds listening for winter fly through it….

It rains deepening the leaves of autumn into
Their mirroring soft singing….

And what has fallen in the rain quiets the fields

Lowering its prayer

Into the earth….

 

Rain
Foggia ghetto
10/14/20

 

 

They sit where horseman have passed
Moisture rising from
the hoof prints….

Owl dreams hovering above them….
on a rainy mountain road near grove Oklahoma
A dead black one lifted its glistening wing
As I passed…..

In a haunted mansion in France
I closed the bathroom mirror the limp wings
And vacant eyes behind me….

These are the ones that chose us….

And will sit with us
While only our shadows remain

and our bones have melted away….

 

Angels
Thursday July 16
Lesina Italy

 

 

You are not a wolf
And this is the land of wolves now….
Sicario, the film, 2015.

 

Long before winter these ones sent
Their tracks looking for you….

The black dog sits among you
Its crimson eyes turned toward you

They will ask you to come out
Whether by your stench of hatred or evil fear

They sit in the blackness where you sleep

They will rise as darkness to enshroud you

They know who you are…..

We are among you

Even now….

 

Dog soldier poem for enemies.
Mahago domiutz tsistsistas
Hotomitoneo
June 30.20

 

 

 

When hunger and fear left them
To search for other ones

They turned to one another lying down

Lights shimmering still
Within them

Now the wind arrives scented of rainfall
And evening opens
its shadowed palm

Who will speak within the language of the other

While the folded birds in the burning forest sing…..

 

After the paintings of Olga Hiiva
Russian artist
From the stronghold
Bologna Italy

 

 

Myanmar

 

Hear the bells in their tiniest voices
Dripping as water….
Embracing you

We love you…
Its sound sings….

We are you….

Where human dreams of freedom are a river
That cannot die….

Irrawaddy

Washita…

We are you….
We are you….

Its sound sings….

 

 

 

 

For Kiel Sin, nicknamed angel.
Young activist killed by Burmese police.
Irrawaddy, Burmese river.
Washita river,site of washita massacre of
My Cheyenne people.

 

Lance Henson has published 28 books of poetry, which have been translated into 25 different languages.

His life has included a stint with the Marines during the Vietnam War; book smuggling into East Berlin with fellow poets; squatting in abandoned buildings as part of an Italian protest movement; and representing the Southern Cheyenne Nation at the European Free Alliance in the Netherlands, and at the United Nations Indigenous Peoples Conference in Geneva.

“Poetry is a discipline I am still trying to acquire,” Henson says. “It seems, as a poet, I am doing as the Tenzo Head Chef of a Zen monastery says, ‘cooking my life.’ What rises to the top or becomes otherwise cooked is the poem itself.”

“I, like many Native writers for my generation, found difficulty finding poets whose poetry spoke directly to us,” he said. “It was the poets outside of America that addressed issues I could comprehend — words and metaphoric responses to genocide, ethnocide and human resistance to inhumanity.”

Cover image: Photo by Nicoletta Lofoco.