My neighbors and I played down by the two deep ponds, circled by hedges
warnings unheeded, crashing through nettles into leach infested waters
our Gallic faces screaming in delight at frog spawn and plump lily pads
one sister, a redhead with gap-tooth grin, the other darker, like late season honey
who knew then? Among the crags of the Pyrénées-Orientales, with their Catalan tongues
we’d split and divide like wheat, losing touch, floundering each, to find our way
as kids, our favorite game was building tepees, wearing feathered headdresses
many years later, sitting in a park in Ontario, I met an Ojibwe mistreated by the state
we sat beneath banners and he told me his Algonquian speaking father was full blood
how his people killed their Inuit neighbors and lost their totem in broken alliances
from this he said, they learned, honesty is the only worth a man possesses
his mother was a French migrant, from Perpignan, on the Spanish border
the very same town I first learned to dance, to make it rain, or so I pretended
I wondered, if somehow fate had flung herself in strange arrowed pathways
all leading back to tepees and kind men, who felt mercy without recompense
since I left and became an immigrant, the gentlest souls I have met, carried
Native American blood in their full cheeks and mercy in their hearts
reminding me of daubing my own face with white stripes and how
we never had cowboys or guns in our games, just long striped feathers
and the goodness of children.
(For B, Mark, Jean, Crystal, Lane & Jack, who carry the blood and make it count).
