The Ancient Ones…
There was a night, in a canyon once, where the walls of rock hugged the sky and the milky way floated by.
I couldn’t breathe, for such an awe may come only once in a lifetime.
The river below, waltzing beside my feet into the vastness of the night seemed to join in chorus with the melody of that river in the sky, flowing in an eternal dance, a pirouette around infinity.
And I felt very small.
For a moment, I fell headlong into the enormity of the universe. A rush of dizziness and timelessness engulfed me.
The breeze, scented with damp sage and red dust, brushed over my skin, and I shivered, but not with cold.
A white-tailed rabbit, her pupils dark with fear and alertness, scurried into the grasses which had tilted over to sip from the river.
I could almost taste the hare’s vitality, her tenuous hold on life in this land of scrawny coyotes, loping out into the night to howl at that vastness overhead.
The Ancients walked here once. Their blood-red and ochre handprints, pressed onto the sandstone cliffs, still tell their story, a tale we will never truly comprehend.
Did the stars look the same to them? Did they weave their stories into the fabric of the night? Did they fly there in dreams?
I can almost feel their breath still, upon my neck, their words whispered around and mingling with the crackle of the leaping flames, and with the sparks drifting up to join their reflections in the sky.
What did they think when the moon ate the sun, and red light washed over the red land? Did their hearts tremble with wonder when that life-giving glowing orb donned her golden robes once again?
And did they ever think that the Perseids meteor shower could touch the earth, stardust to be gathered in their hands….
And the moon, on her nightly round-about the heavens pregnant with light, giving birth to darkness — how did they explain it?
The wind whispered in my ear, and I heard a young girl’s laugh, a tinkling of happiness sprinkling into the night. The chatter of copper bells danced away on soft moccasins.
I spun around, but she was not there.
Did she walk here once, long ago, marveling at the nightly show? Did she hold a lover’s hand as they slipped into the soft night? Did she scream with agony and joy at the birth of her children? Or beat her breast with the searing pain of the loss of parents or mate? When she died, did she join her ancestors in that spinning, dizzying world overhead?
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a streak of light sweeping across the sky. A star fallen to earth? I wondered, breathless.
The hare, startled by a breath of movement, darted past me, long legs gathering and pulsing in a frantic dash. But, then she paused, still as the canyon walls.
Her pawprints, embedded in the soft wet mud by the river’s edge, mirrored the sky above. I followed them to their point of origin. And there, beside the lapping waters, I thought I saw a small moccasined footprint.
I stooped to look closer, and beside it, something glinted like a tiny star in the shallows.
My fingers traced its surface and closed over the roundness of a small copper bell….
This poem is based on an evening when my husband and I “sunk” our Land Rover Discovery in the bottom of Canyon de Chelly, on the Navajo reservation in the four-corners area. After many attempts to be extracted from the muddy river by men and horses, we finally had to send for a 6-wheel drive vehicle to come pull us out. While we waited, we watched the milky way drift by, floating between the high walls of the canyon and off into the inky sky. I have never before, or since, seen stars as vivid as they were that cold night when we huddled by the river, breathing the breaths of the ancient ones.
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Poem and photos ©Erika Burkhalter, all rights reserved.