High Desert

 

rich lavender skies cast botanical hues
beneath knees of mute bluffs
splashed by deep orange sunsets
watered by the Snake run with tears
shed by warrior ghosts
Shoshone and Paiute and Ute
keeping vigil on rituals
practiced for ten thousand years
here in the hauntings

 

color dances with texture
across ballroom landscapes
where moccasins made gentle injury
where buffalo skins swaddled tentpoles
and spirits spoke portents in pipesmoke
but to see them today takes a shamanic gaze
into killing field shadows and riverbank mists
tracing grounds of a once sacred world
whose future will never match history