The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

toward one another.
Their pulses beat
against the neck’s thick skin.
They grow closer.
Let us be gentle
with the fiery furnaces
smelling of hay and rum,
gentle with the veils of skin
that bind us
to the world.
Let us hold fierce
the soft lives of our children,
the light is inside them
and they are burning
in small beds of straw,
beds of scorched white sheets,
newspaper beds with words
wrapped against skin
the light burns through.
The women cross their hands
on their chests
and lie down to sleep a moment
along dust roads.
In the dark, Japanese women
light lanterns
the shape of children.
They blow gently
on the sides of hills,
the roads
illuminated by the bodies of children