Inexhaustible silence pushed us in deeper
We became vast in its presence
Whenever we slowed or stopped
Wherever our feet touched ground
We found a hundred sorrowful things to love
Inside the Navajo nation
our tires hit washboard road
A clunky expedition met
the imposing dignity of ancestral desert
Where ancient cave dwellings converge
with patches of mobile homes and abandoned Chevy trucks
A ghost town feeling threads through random settlements
Here and there, they seem to thrive...but most appear as if stranded
Pueblo ruins and corrugated aluminum shanty-villes
Mirror each other at a distance
Collapsing into the sand, the ground... as if trying to return home
Still, the strength of the tribe endures
As does the Dwarf Oak and the Cottonwood with its
complex Sage understory
The ways of Song and Story are protected here
by those with a powerful will to wait
Who suspend themselves upside down on the oldest limbs
of desert trees
Watching the land intently as they have for millennia
With all other eyes ( more than human )
They peer through their canyon wall windows
Whispering blackened or nearly extinct languages
who speak the textured sounds of the woven Place
Songs guide, tales navigate wilderness
and negotiate threat
These we imagined embedded in thousands of caves and Kivas
The refuges of the still threatened land
Vast reservoirs veiled by darkness
Vulnerable to pillagers and thieves
even now.
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