Something or someone calls
not from the dream time
but from below the sea
where the sleek seal dives
or in the belly of the rock
that gives the shape to water
or the land itself wanting to rise
through dry waving grass
and release on the wind.
Perhaps it’s just me
struggling each day
to find my birth,
coming into the world
again and again
with a soul, a spirit
and such a frail body.
Weak before the forces
of time and knowledge,
broken like a twig
in the hands of the earth
yet returning each morning
to the altar of the sacred.
Singing with the only voice I have
the words of belonging
sung to the sea
then passing like a cloud.

I harvest silence
like a field of hay,
threshing intimacy
into rows of emptiness,
raked and combed
by long sharp tines
of the inner life,
storing silence against
the growing hunger,
everything so full
we starve.

If I awoke before light,
before bird call
and waves beating,
if I got up so early
there was only me and you
the only two awake
in the whole wide world,
while islands slept
and we watched the sun
break into the sky
with the radiance of a star,
then we would know our place
in the arms of the earth
all of it open
unmarked and ancient.
That would be the morning.

One man has left the earth;
his wolf-dog went before him
scouting the way
on the old journey
into the timeless,
leaving behind
his music,
his trickster,
the joy he fired
from the grief
of his family
to forge a life
on the high mesa,
playing his flute
to the four directions,
to the animals
and desert plants,
playing to the sun rising
and to his greater spirit
lifted now into the invisible
with the sound of his laughter,
the echo of his music
and the mask he carved
on his earth walk
as a warrior and a friend.

Ron Laws
Coyos Seeing Hawk
Modoc Heritage and Emissary
9/3/42 – 7/2/15
RIP brother