I'm reading an old story / From the Cayuse people / And according to this old wisdom tale

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I read in BBC World:
Kenya rolls out poison in bid to cull a million crows

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Crow
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Poem: Poisoning crows -- bad idea

I'm reading an old story

From the Cayuse people

And according to this old wisdom tale

There was a time when people were animals.

That's right, there was some confusion

As to whether people were animals.

Sometimes they would take off their furs and feathers

To get naked and dance in the moonlight.

One time when they were dancing naked

Spirit sent a big golden eagle down

Kind of like a big storm or hurricane

To steal their furs and feathers.

When they were tired of dancing

And went to put on their animal skins

They couldn't find them.

Then they had to get fire to stay warm

And to cook their food because

They gradually forgot that they used to be animals

And they lost their taste for raw food, etc.

Also they started killing and enslaving their animal relatives.

It was just a small step to

Thinking it was OK to poison plants and

Furry and feathered creatures.

Along with each other.

Now I can only imagine spirit thinking

"Gee, I guess I made a mistake

When I took away their skins and feathers."

I wonder if Spirit has an idea

For fixing the problem.

I happen to know that crows are pretty special to Spirit

But they don't respect, much less, trust people.

I wonder why?

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(Article changed on Aug 01, 2024 at 10:39 AM EDT)

(Article changed on Aug 01, 2024 at 10:50 AM EDT)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.