Like an emergent moth
I’m flitting up a slope.
Here strips of colored cloth
affixed to every tree
are prayers, the windblown hope
of those who climb to see.
This is a laccolith
upthrust through sediment,
perduring like a myth
through man’s prehistory,
Pa Sapa ’s pediment.
Come climb Bear Butte with me.
Twelve hundred feet in dream
I climb when hope is gone,
when like Red Cloud I seem
ringed by my enemies,
when I have need at dawn
for prayer flags in the trees.
Note: Mato Paha means Bear Butte, and Pa Sapa, Black Hills, in the Sioux language.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Ethics of Rhetoric in Times of War
What we say matters. And the way we say it matters. This is especially true in times…
How the State Failed Noelia Castillo
On March 26, Noelia Castillo, a twenty-five-year-old Spanish woman, was killed by her doctors at her own…
The Mind’s Profane and Sacred Loves
The teachers you have make all the difference in your life. That they happened to come into…
