The Well

In late winter
when the snow loosens its grip
and the earth begins to breathe again,
a purple crocus lifts its small spear
through the cold skin of the prairie.

No one teaches it courage.
It simply rises.

The valley waits quietly
under the wide sky of Father Sun.
The river bends where it has always bent,
where drums once carried across the water
from a camp no map remembers.

Somewhere in the grass
there are ashes from old fires.

Somewhere beneath the ground
are bundles wrapped in memory,
and food prepared for a long road
where travelers grow hungry.

The wind moves over the hills
as it did before any of us were named.

A man walks the ridgeline
where the prairie breaks into valley.
He carries stories the way a river carries silt—
too many to count,
too heavy to set down.

He has seen winters
that buried whole villages in silence.
He has seen the morning sun
strike the windows of a city
that once was only grass.

He has seen people leave
through the black doorway
all two-leggeds must one day enter.

Still he walks.

The earth remembers every footprint
but never asks why it was placed there.

In the tall grass
berries darken toward sweetness
under a patient sun.

They do not know
which one will be picked first.

But they do know exactly who
is the picker, if not which of
many mouths will taste them.

They only ripen.

Night falls over the prairie
like a blanket of quiet stars.

Far above, the Trail of Spirits
turns slowly through the sky
as it always has.

A man sits beside the river
listening for something
that cannot be heard with ears.

He learns, slowly,
what the elders tried to say.

That joy is not a separate country
from sorrow.

That they are neighbors
drawing water from the same place.

And that the heart,
like the earth,
must sometimes be broken open
before it can hold rain.

So the people say—

Čhaŋtéšiča uŋkúŋspi kiŋ mní owígli uŋkáǧapi;
wówašte uŋkúŋspi kiŋ hé mní kiŋ owáŋyankapi.

Our sorrows dig deep the well;
later our joys are the waters that fill it.