Poor Lazarus

Live long enough

and salt pork, beans,
yearling colts, honey and butter,
            something will turn into a wedge
            to bend your will.

Missionaries call for my sons to send off to school,
each season when the corn is green.
I tuck them into the rows
farthest to the north of my cabin.
Keep them busy with the threshing as I whisper
their true names into the ears we consume,
            but I leave a path to them
            like a snake
            by slithering away through the sparse harvest.

Frost breaks under my mare’s hooves
when I ride to sign my name at the Neosho mission.
My sons and nephews
traded to industrial school in the north
            for the release of seven barrels of winter rations.

This commerce—
makes me brother to dragons, companion to owls.

Riding away from the mission,
I call to my sister’s youngest child,
            the only one
            still too young for school,
            come over here and ride withyour old uncle.

The boy clambers up behind me,
bare toe notched into the girth for warmth and purchase.
My boots quiver along the sides of the horse’s flanks
            as I endeavor to slip them into the stirrups
            that frame the ground below in jerky patches.

Child, I keep repeating, Nephew.
The horse dances nervously,
sensing my frenzy.
To his credit,
            the boy
            keeps a steady hand on the reins.

— Laura Da’, Eastern Shawnee/Seneca/Miami poet and teacher, poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, 2022-2024.

Passive Voice

I use a trick to teach students 
how to avoid passive voice. 

Circle the verbs. 
Imagine inserting “by zombies” 
after each one. 

Have the words been claimed 
by the flesh-hungry undead? 
If so, passive voice. 

I wonder if these 
sixth graders will recollect, 
on summer vacation, 
as they stretch their legs 
on the way home 
from Yellowstone or Yosemite 
and the byway’s historical marker 
beckons them to the site of an Indian village— 

Where trouble was brewing. 
Where, after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter. 
Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred. 
Where most were women and children. 

Riveted bramble of passive verbs 
etched in wood— 
stripped hands 
breaking up from the dry ground 
to pinch the meat 
of their young red tongues. 


 --Laura Da’, poet and public school teacher, member of the Eastern Band of the Shawnee, from Tributaries, 2015