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RITUAL

The anthropology professor
said Iroquois ways were a fading reflection, 
a cultural trace of a poetic narrative of indigenous
wisdom, tribal traditions that marry the spirit of
a primitive people to enduring kinship with the
earth and the sky

The anthropology professor called the delicate
touch the definitive expression of intimate knowledge,
giving meaning and myth to mystical caprice in the
cardinal winds, to sustaining abundance in the deep gray
lakes of a primeval forest beneath the cyclical rhythms
of a lunar calendar that is daily affirmed
by the rising sun

The anthropology professor said the bloated
ambitions of mercantile man, the rapacious imperatives
of voracious desire, the arrogant corrective technology
of guilt which acknowledges nature as interchangeable 
scenery for the story of our lives, should become like the
methods and modes of harmony, that the way of 
Six Nations be the simple foundation for symbiotic 
behavior in the millennium to come

And the anthropology student was twenty
and tough, a perpetual hunter, a perennial warrior,
attuned to the season of bounty and challenge, alert to 
nuance of movement and sound, knew the intricate ways
of the Haudenosaunee and the signature rites that
prepared them for war

To honor the creator
he came through the mists of a cold spring morning
like wind in the trees without source or destination, 
embodied the essence of some terrible presence – 
an unexplained whisper in an isolated place, the feather of
a wing beyond peripheral vision, perhaps the shadow of
a serpent beyond the edge of the nerves, something too
close, something suddenly striking in the ghostly 
memories of ritual violence of “the danse lacrosse”,
“dehuntshigawa’es”, baaga’adowe, a game called
begadwe,  little brother of war!
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