Reply #26: Poems by James Welch and Sherwin Bitsui [View All]

[Wetzelbill]

These are from James Welch, a great writer and friend of mine who died a few years ago. I'm adapting one of his novels into a screenplay.

In My First Hard Springtime by James Welch

Those red men you offended were my brothers.
Town drinkers, Buckles Pipe, Star Boy,
Billy Fox, were blood to bison. Albert Heavy Runner
was never civic. You are white and common.

Record trout in Willow Creek chose me
to deify. My horse, Centaur, part cayuse,
was fast and mad and black. Dandy in flat hat
and buckskin, I rode the town and called it mine.

A slow hot wind tumbled dust against my door.
Fed and fair, you mocked my philosophic nose,
my badger hair. I rolled your deference
in the hay and named it love and lasting.

Starved to visions, famous cronies top Mount Chief
for names to give respect to Blackfeet streets.
I could deny them in my first hard springtime,
but choose amazed to ride you down with hunger.



Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat by James Welch

Christmas comes like this: Wise men
unhurried, candles bought on credit (poor price
for calves), warriors face down in wine sleep.
Winds cheat to pull heat from smoke.

Friends sit in chinked cabins, stare out
plastic windows and wait for commodities.
Charlie Blackbird, twenty miles from church
and bar, stabs his fire with flint.

When drunks drain radiators for love
or need, chiefs eat snow and talk of change,
an urge to laugh pounding their ribs.
Elk play games in high country.

Medicine Woman, clay pipe and twist tobacco,
calls each blizzard by name and predicts
five o'clock by spitting at her television.
Children lean into her breath to beg a story:

Something about honor and passion,
warriors back with meat and song,
a peculiar evening star, quick vision of birth.
Blackbird feeds his fire. Outside, a quick 30 below.
------

This is from another friend of mine, Sherwin Bitsui, a Navajo poet, who is an absolute genius.

The Scent of Burning Hair by Sherwin Bitsui

I circle my shadow
at 5 A.M. when crickets gather in the doorway
showing their teeth and striped tongues,
silver eyes,
singing about a wind-blown desert
sinking into the waist of a setting sun.

I have become a man crawling over his broken fingers,
searching for a ring to plant my lips on,
eating cinders while breaking eggs on brother's white skin.

I have either become a black dot growing legs,
running from the blank page,
or the mud that is caked over the keyhole of a church hiding its bandaged eyes.

The bed quivers;
it wants to become a spider again
and sting silent the antelope that leap over children
whose mothers abandon their pots
and follow hoofprints into the city,
smudging themselves with the smoke of burning hair.

Look! There between the eyes of the horizon:
two crows waiting for our bodies.

Imagine this at 5 A.M.,
when the river slides into a silent city
stuffed with decaying corn husks,
when everyone discovers razors in the womb of this land,
and the sun decides which bridges should be covered with skin and leaves
and which should remain as goat ribs submerged in sand smelling of diesel engines.