“Freedom is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
Ocean Vuong
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destiny
Plains Indian Artifacts–Beaded Moccasins
Last evening I attended a new exhibit at Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. The exhibit featured moccasins, paintings, and various artifacts made by different Great Plains tribes, including a headdress worn by Quanah Parker. The exhibit also contains many old photographs. A number of Comanches were present including a lady over 100 years old.
After I left the exhibit, I kept thinking about it and wondered how current Comanches might feel when they come to something like this which in many ways honors them but also displays a past that will never return. While contemplating, I wrote this poem about what I saw.
Beaded moccasins,
moons of work.
Ceremonial beauty,
now encased in glass, labelled, dated by someone’s guess,
for strangers who believe in a strange god,
desecrate the land,
waste invaluable water,
kill bears for sport.
Weep
Wait
Palo Duro Canyon, Comanche Country, where they made their last stand and were forced to go to a reservation in Oklahoma after federal troops killed over a thousand of their horses.
Daughter of the Moon
Woman, wondrous, wild
daughter of the moon,
mysterious, magnificent
fierce secret keeper
guardian of the universal key.
Sunday Poem–Choose
“Most people are about as happy as they
make up their minds to be.” Abraham Lincoln
When I was twenty something, I chose happiness, not the sappy, syrupy, cheery, but a deeper joy of cherishing the small, the unique, the everyday, smiling with sunsets, the song of the mockingbird in spring, horses running free, the nearly invisible bobcat climbing the canyon wall, the taste of fine coffee at the first wakeful moments in the morning, cooking for friends, taking a “property walk” with my grandson, laughing with the teenagers I teach. I am driven to do little–obsessions, compulsions do not run me. I choose. Choose life, choose joy, or choose whining, choose lamenting. Choose!! Be who you want to be; do what you want to do.
Note: this is a poem from my book, “On the Rim of Wonder”.
Predetermined?
Today at the bookstore browsing, I picked up a book nestled among the magazines.
This question appeared on page 41: “If you were given a book on the story of your life,
would you read the end?”
I asked my grandson. He immediately said, “No!”
I wonder.
Remain unsure.
If I read it, could I change it?
Are lives predetermined, choiceless?
Are we unwittingly predetermined and just victims?
If I read it, could I change it?
Eat something different,
sing a varied song,
laugh more,
spend more time with sunsets, sunrises,
read less, more,
love someone new,
say words now lost,
write a contrary story,
choose an opposing path,
challenge?
Wickeder and Wickeder by Barbara Ardinger
A tale for our times.
The raven was standing on the little table in the wicked witch’s private room. Expecting a new kind of feast, he dipped his beak into a bowl of wiggly white worms. And spat them clear across the room. “Great Suffering Succotash!” he exclaimed. “What is this stuff?’
“It’s ramen noodles,” the witch replied calmly. ”They’re cheap. And you know we need to save money. El Presidente’s got men cruising around the country doing whatever they want to obstruct justice. We’re all trying to save money and build up the resistance.”
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Springing Forward with the Wicked Witch by Barbara Ardinger
A story for our time!!!
El Presidente was enlarging his war against his citizens. This meant the roads were more crowded than before with refugees fleeing the capital city for safety among the farmers on the plains and up in the hills. Some of these refugees arrived, of course, at the farm of the wicked witch.
Whenever a family arrived, the witch would put on her wickedest face and voice (she’d been practicing) and tell the children she was going to roast them and eat them with mashed potatoes and baby gravy. The children believed her for about a minute and a half, whereas their parents just smiled as each family was taken in hand by the senior refugees and led to rooms where there were new beds. The tenured refugees had (with the witch’s permission) taken charge and somehow found enough lumber to build two new rooms (lean-tos) at the side of the house…
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Publication!
A writing colleague posted this on her blog today. It expresses so much of what I feel about so many things that I just had to reblog it. As soon as I finish this reblog, I am going to look for one of these statues for myself. Here’s to a fabulous today and a creative, adventurous future.
I am pleased to report that my flash fiction piece, “A Brother’s Gift” has been accepted for publication at the Provo Canyon Review, a print literary journal. I am especially pleased about this because I rather impulsively submitted it when I saw the Provo Canyon Review’s Call for Submissions. This is a very short piece, but the editors said they liked the tone and also thought it was “A refreshing and moving look at grief and the true emotional impact of such a loss.”
I am happy. Here it is in case you missed it first time round.
A Brother’s Gift
Mary Lou Holder sank down next to her brother, the one who was dying of cancer, and started pulling on the bright red bow of the gift he had just handed her. “This is sweet, Jake, that you’ve gotten me a present. You know you didn’t have to…”
Jacob…
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My Father
Recently I decided to try writing poems about a few family members. Months ago on this blog I published a poem about my Grandmother along with the marriage photo of her and my grandfather, who was so much older than she (22 years) that I never knew him at all. In June I posted photos of the trip I took back to Missouri where I grew up. While a few things remained the same, I felt very sad about some changes and kept thinking how my dad must feel if he were watching. He died in 1996, lived in the same house for 80 years and on the same farm all his life. He labored long and hard to make the homeplace beautiful.
He watches:
The house where he was born
gone
Only the old carriage house stands.
The young man who farms the land cannot bear to tear it down.
He watches:
The ancient burr oaks and black walnuts
gone
bulldozed into waste piles or sold for greed.
He watches:
The house he lived and loved in for eighty years
still stands on land his family owned for more than 100.
Strangers live there:
He sees the well trimmed lawn,
new picket fence,
children playing.
He watches:
The pond he proudly built and stocked with fish reflects the summer sun.
The tree filled park between the pond and house
gone
He wonders why someone would destroy such beauty.
He watches:
The walnut grove where he ran cattle
gone
The pond where his grandson caught the giant turtle
gone
plowed over and planted to corn and soybeans.
He watches.
Do you like to eat? Bees and the Food Supply
Do you like to eat? Do you eat almonds, apples, cherries, watermelon, blueberries, or cantaloupe? In fact, the biggest factor limiting the world’s food supply is not war, drought, or any of the factors you commonly hear about. The world’s food supply is limited by the amount of bees available for pollination. In the last five years in the United States alone, approximately one million honey bee colonies died each year, about one third of our national bee herd. Bees are in danger of extinction. Native to Southeast Asia, honey bees were domesticated long before written history, before the building of the Egyptian pyramids. Thousands of species of bees exist, but honey bees carry the main load of pollination for cultivated crops.
More than 740,000 acres of almonds, California’s leading agricultural export, remain in cultivation in the Central Valley of California. Pollination depends on bumble bees, honey bees, and wild bees. Sadly, the wild bees are mostly extinct, killed by pesticides and habitat loss. Now pollination depends on traveling bee keepers and their honey bees. Today, commercial bee keepers number one fourth of what they did in 1980. To get enough bees the almond (and cherry and apple, etc.) growers hire these bee keepers to install approximately 2 million bee hives to work the pollination. Almonds alone require at least 1.5 million hives. Each almond tree’s blossoms number 25,000 and at 135 or so trees per acre, that adds up to 3.5 million flowers to pollinate. The difference between a poor harvest and a great one depends on bees. After the bees finish their work in the Central Valley and other warmer climates, the commercial keepers take them to places like Idaho and North Dakota for the summer where they sip alfalfa, buckwheat, goldenrod, and sweet clover blossoms and produce the honey sold in groceries.
Where have all the bees gone? What leads them toward extinction? In 2006-2008, beehives across the world from Europe to here to Indian and Brazil nearly collapsed. Causes vary: foulbrood–a bacterial fungus, wasps, ants, mice, a host of viruses, nosema–bee diarrhea, and certain pesticides. What can we do? First, we can ban certain pesticides that are known to harm bees. Second, we need to grow more flowers and blooming weeds (yes, I said weeds) to encourage a broader spectrum of healthy bees for pollination. Honey bees cannot do it all alone. The lack of sufficient flowers is the result of not only pesticides, but also the increase in lawns. If you personally want to make a difference for bees and ultimately our food supply, let the wild flowers grow, plant more flowers and less lawn, limit pesticide use.
This morning I went out to my xeroscape garden–I have no lawn–and photographed bees. At one catmint plant, so many busy bees made a clearly audible buzzing sound. I witnessed at least four different kinds–species–of bees. These 
photographs illustrate at least several different types of flowers bees love.
