Myth of Arrival

We all have our prayers for the dead. This is mine for SPC Lori Ann Piestewa (December 14, 1979 – March 23, 2003). She was a U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps and is remembered as the first woman killed in the 2003 Iraq war as well as the first aboriginal American woman to die in combat while serving with the U.S. military. She was a member of the Hopi tribe.

Her surname, Piestewa, is derived from a Hopi root word meaning "water pooled on the desert by a hard rain," which is where the song of this poem came from. Respect comes in many forms and though I never met Piestewa my thoughts are for her family and friends and everyone she touched. When we step outside of our comfort zone (whatever that might be) and extend ourselves to both those we love and know but to strangers we shall never meet in this life that is where compassion starts. And from com/passion comes passion and from that emotion there is enough love for everyone, both the living and the dead; like rain filling a pool after a long drought.

and then the rhythm starts where strange mercy
has been. the last drops to fall in desert
pools as their hard rains end can taste very
much like mercy too. what little effort
do we make, daily, to fill our bodies
with such gifts? some things are so down-to-earth
that we call them compassions and mercies;
why then this sadness and grief? if the birth
of just one desert pool is a blessed
thing so is its ending. let the bloodstain
on the rock remember this; the rain cools
as it washes it away. the acrid
dirt knows the taste of the returning rain,
something pulsing, filling its long dry pools.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.