Songs of 7 mothers

still drift over Three Sisters

under the Full Flower Moon,

planting maize, climbing beans and winter squash.

Children still listen for their uncle’s flutes

inside boarding schools

where they’re stuffed into chairs,

away from the dugouts skimming through their veins,

taught how to hold a pen and a pencil

so they can learn how to forget

to plant their name.

Pressed into paper,

in hopes that their sap will run dry.

But the melodies ride on

above hooves of Appaloosas,

scattering white clover petals …

and light dapples off new shoots of willow trees

above the heads of the mothers song,

planting

“All Cherokee music has been made to where it resorts back to gospel, to our Creator.” Kathy Sierra