Category: Poems & poem-like things

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (conclusion)

7. Simón Zopeloxochitl de Texcoco

The hummingbird of day has yielded
to the hummingbird of night.

With a single pair of feathers on his head
he flies on wings of mica
& finds his way with eyes
of yellow quartz.

Unlike his daytime cousin
he doesn’t do battle:
summer nights are short.
Flowers uncurl after sunset just for him.
Pry open the tight
bud of his thorax,
searching out the heart to eat for courage,
& you won’t find
anything that beats:
a maze of dry husks filled with moonlight.
His powdered wings are a recipe for madness.

Listen, my comrades,
the hummingbird’s day is done.
Let us learn to fly by night
& feed on dreams.

__________

The tutelary deity of the Aztecs was Huitzilopochtli, “Left-foot-like-a-Hummingbird.” He was a war/sacrifice/sanguinary nourishment god worshipped throughout the Valley of Mexico. In some parts of highland Mexico and Central America, the hearts of hummingbirds are still fed to boys to give them courage.

“Hummingbird of night” refers, of course, to the sphinx moth.

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

6. Digger Wasp Shaman (to the accompaniment of a musical rasp)

dirt flies out from under
my folded wings
I stand at the door of my pit house
& turn around four times
looking all over for something
good to drink

*

as hard as I shake my wings
there’s no rattle
I stomp my feet
no drum
I make a nice shelter
& no one comes in
the hole’s too narrow
the caterpillar’s spines are too sharp

*

flying & walking
walking & lifting off
I scour the land
turning turning
make my own dizzying wind

*

I fly behind the sun:
he alone of all beings has
no shadow
I burrow under the rainbow:
she alone of all beings
cannot be approached

*

flycatcher called me a witch
because my medicine is strong
& I can heal
what others cannot
bring wisdom to the careless
humility to the powerful
a goad to all those
who sleep past sunrise

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

5. Jose de la Chichimeca, alias Alma de Perro

“Mother, I love
a boy in Jalisco.”
“No, mi hija, no.
For an Indian girl the only thing
is to find an hidalgo with spurs that sing
& five hundred men in the mines.”

“Mother, I love
a boy in Jiquipilco.”
“No, cariña, no.
This gentleman may be a little old
but his teeth & his toothpick are solid gold
& he has three hundred men in the mines.”

“Mother, I love
a boy in Chalco.”
“No, mi unica, no.
Though the doctor wears black & is a little thin
he’s white, & he has a nice wide grin
& a hundred men in the mines.”

“Mother, I love
a boy in Tlatelolco.”
“No, mi vida, no.
You’re too sick to make it out the door–
though it’s nothing this gentleman can’t cure,
& he’s still got fifty men
down in the mines.”

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

4. Owl-Meeter Shaman

a boy of ten summers
ay, ah! a boy of ten summers
I thought I knew something
when I went off into the hills
to hunt deer

*

my body lies broken
in a desolate place
far from the sound of water
our gray brother circles & keeps going
our shining-eyed companion
looks sideways without stopping

*

every spot
between you & the enemy
that can sleep a band of hunters
I can show
I know every secret thing
in this flowering land

*

what I paid
such a bitter price to learn
look out
it’s free for the asking

__________

As with many native American peoples, for the O’odham, owls are spirits of the dead. But they were not regarded with the kind of invariable dread found elsewhere. An aspiring shaman could learn songs from owl-spirits, who conveyed unique knowledge of both worlds and proffered a dangerous magic that could be turned upon enemies of the tribe. Owl-meeter shamans frequently became masters of war-making magic.

our gray brother, our shining-eyed companion: Traditional O’odham poetic euphemisms for Coyote.

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

3. Martí­n Medina de Sevilla (accompanying himself on a homemade guitar)

Seven caravels set sail
from Seville, fairest of cities,
plowing seven furrows
on the Guadalquivir.

From each ship arises such
a gust, such storms of wails
& sighs & blowing of noses
that they need no other wind

to carry them out past
the Punta del Perro,
stone muzzle
frozen at point–

dog nose, they’ll need thy direction,
through storm & calm
to find the Isles
of the Bless’d.

And as they drop
below the horizon
the guitarist’s fingers canter
across the strings:

“Tell me, you who nod
or tap your cup,
these poor sinners–
who do you say they are?

Will you wager on
the last Christians, with
the Seven Cities of Antilla
rising from the salt?

Or are they Jews,
fleeing their nests
at the first cock-crow
of the Inquisition?”

__________

the last Christians: As mentioned in “Beginnings,” Spanish ballads of the late Middle Ages assumed that Christians had been driven from the Iberian Peninsula during the initial Muslim conquest in the eight century, and that some of them ended up founding idyllic, Christian colonies in “Antilla.” Thus were the utopian visions of a New World to the west bound up with the Reconquest and national-messianic dreams of recapturing the Holy Land in the east. Such ahistorical (and ageographical) propaganda helped build public support for the forced conversion or expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492.

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

2. White-Feather Priest

straight along the western edge of the land
I went where the great birds cry
wheeling
alighting on hills of sand
on hills of sea

*

the sun just down
through the waves
a dark road opens
ai ah this pounding in my chest

*

there my guardian comes
with his white cane
there he strikes me
& drags me under

*

four kinds of water
he gives me to drink
a bitter brew I fly
on a bitter wind

*

then I hear then I hear
what the gulls are crying
then I gather
songs

*

at the still
center of the land
something pounds
something threatens to break

__________

This section draws its imagery from translations of O’odham song cycles and speeches associated with the once-annual salt pilgrimage to the Gulf of California. (I am not entirely certain who or what the spirit guardian represents.) It’s impossible to say how much of later, O’odham religious tradition echoes the priestly religion of their ancestors the Hohokam, but I imagine that basic elements of worldview have remained intact, including the notion of water as both dangerous and essential to life, and the conception of the earth as surrounded and underlain by it. This idea is too widespread in the broader Meso-American cultural region to have been derived from similar conceptions in the Hebrew Bible. And in what is now the desert southwest of the United States, such a belief system seems especially apt, given the perils of both floodwater cultivation and irrigation, which the Hohokam perfected to a degree elsewhere matched only by the desert agriculturalists of coastal Peru.

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

1. El Donado Marcos de la Sierra

Day after day
the lizards dance on the sand.
When the sun climbs high
the mountains won’t
sit still. Even the tortoise
toiling as little as he can
moves in time with the maguey’s
sharp-tongued shadow.

Sun. Tree. Stone. Sky.
The will to circle in the wind.
To walk like Lucifer up
& down in the earth
or lope like Coyote, always
one meal from the end.

Let the fullness without
break the drought within–
the way all teeming
prayers & curses seem
to seed the clouds,
go stepping out with feet of rain
on a Galilee of air.

This very day I too
will begin dancing.

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest

Sated with flatbread & venison,
men & women laughing
in a half dozen languages
fall silent when the chief elder stands up
beside the newly erected cross.
He speaks in a low voice,
just above a whisper–wind
in mesquite leaves, rustle of the first
fat raindrops in the dust. The sound
of power. The crowd stops
being a crowd; listening is a thing
each person does for herself.
Hands lie still in laps. At length
the elder returns to his seat, his last
few words breathed rather than spoken.

Then the town crier–a much
younger man–gets up, wielder
of plain words. His speech takes
half the time, even allowing
for rhythmic pauses. Each phrase
passes from language to language
around the square.

Your coming has honored us.

For it is only through songs
that the hearts of all creatures
open fully, flowers for night-
flying moths . . .

With this, the polyglot susurration
swells to a hum: A singing contest.
The rest of the speech is lost
in gathering excitement.

The friar’s party gathers in a knot.
A nobleman from Texcoco
agrees to join the three oblates–one
a half-breed raised in Spain, the other two
donados: given to the Order as children
for what their terrified parents assumed
would be a sacrifice.
They have between them songs enough
to challenge the town’s best.

Meanwhile the women too
have been whispering: now
a grandmother stands up & says
that since none of their number
wishes to compete, they’ll be willing
all together to act as judges,
hold the stakes.

Relieved murmurs sweep the plaza.
This way each side will be able to save face
& munificence alone will shape
the outcome, it seems,
since women have never been able to agree
on a single thing since the world began–
a fortunate thing for men
& all their whims, their roguish heads
aswarm with desires, the lice of envy
itching, itching, grown plump
with the scalp’s own blood.

* * *

Marcos slips off to begin his evening prayers
while all eyes are on the singers
gathering at one end of the plaza.
Six translators sit in a semicircle at the foot
of the cross & pass a reed cigarette.

The smoke spirals to the west:
May your words
strengthen all hearts.

(To be continued.)

Reader (12)

We lift our songs, our flowers,
these songs of the Only Spirit.
Then friends embrace,
the companions in each other’s arms.
So it has been said by Tochihuitzin,
so it has been said by Coyolchiuhqui:
We come here only to sleep,
we come here only to dream;
it is not true, it is not true
that we come to live on earth.
ANON. AZTEC, 16th century
(adapted by David Damrosch from the translation of John Bierhorst, Cantares
Mexicanos 18:39)

The honored men are singers. The man who has fought for his people gets no honor from that fact, but only from the attendant fact that he was able to “receive”–or compose, shall we say–a song. . . . What of a society where the misfit, wandering hopelessly misunderstood on the outskirts of life, is not the artist, but the unimaginative young businessman? This society not only exists but has existed for hundreds of years.
RUTH MURRAY UNDERHILL
Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona

All Piman songs, regardless of “way” or type, are formed in the same song language. We may draw the implication from this, that for Pimans “song language” is the lingua franca of the intelligent universe. This is a Piman manifestation of a theme common among North American Indians: In ancient times the animals and men talked the same language. Among Pimans they still do and that language is song. A further implication is that this lingua franca is now spoken in dreams, for that is how singers get their songs. Presumably the linguistic transcript of a dream, if such were possible, would be largely in song language.
DONALD BAHR et. al.
“Piman Songs on Hunting”