For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash

Beneath a sky blurred with mist and wind,
 I am amazed as I watch the violet
 heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth
 after dying for a season,
 as I have watched my own dark head
 appear each morning after entering
 the next world to come back to this one,
 amazed.
 It is the way in the natural world to understand the place
 the ghost dancers named
 after the heart breaking destruction.
 Anna Mae,
 everything and nothing changes.
 You are the shimmering young woman
 who found her voice,
 when you were warned to be silent, or have your body cut away
 from you like an elegant weed.
 You are the one whose spirit is present in the dappled stars.
 (They prance and lope like colored horses who stay with us
 through the streets of these steely cities. And I have seen them
 nuzzling the frozen bodies of tattered drunks
 on the corner.)
 This morning when the last star is dimming
 and the busses grind toward
 the middle of the city, I know it is ten years since they buried you
 the second time in Lakota, a language that could
 free you.
 I heard about it in Oklahoma, or New Mexico,
 how the wind howled and pulled everything down
 in righteous anger.
 (It was the women who told me) and we understood wordlessly
 the ripe meaning of your murder.
 As I understand ten years later after the slow changing
 of the seasons
 that we have just begun to touch
 the dazzling whirlwind of our anger,
 we have just begun to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers
 entered
 crazily, beautifully.