Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

Asiniig

The Ojibwe word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are alive. They are addressed as grandmothers and grandfathers. The universe began with a conversation between stones.

1

A thousand generations of you live and die

in the space of a single one of our thoughts.

A complete thought is a mountain.

We don’t have very many ideas.

When the original fire which formed us

subsided,

we thought of you.

We allowed you to occur.

We are still deciding whether that was

wise.

2 Children

We have never denied you anything

you truly wanted

no matter how foolish

no matter how destructive

but you never seem to learn.

That which you cry for,

this wish to be like us,

we have tried to give it to you

in small doses, like a medicine, every day

so you will not be frightened.

Still, when death comes

you weep,

you do not recognize it

as the immortality you crave.

3 The Sweat Lodge

We love it when you sing to us,

and speak to us,

and lift us from the heart of the fire

with the deer’s antlers, and place us

in the center of the lodge.

Then we are at our most beautiful,

Powerful red blossoms,

we are breathing.

We can reach through your bones

to where you hurt.

You call us grandfather, grandmother.

You scatter bits of cedar, sage, wikenh, tobacco

and bear root over us,

and then the water

which cracks us to the core.

When we break ourselves open—

that is when the healing starts.

When you break yourselves open—

that is how the healing continues.

4 Love

If only you could be more like us

when it comes to the affections.

Have you ever seen a stone

throw itself?

On the other hand

whose idea do you think it is

to fly through the air?

Mystery is not a passive condition.

To see a thing so perfectly what it is—

doesn’t it make you

want to hold it,

to marvel, to touch

its answered question?

5 Gratitude

You have no call to treat us this way.

We allow you to put us to every use.

Yet, when have you ever

stopped in the street to lay your forehead

against the cool, black granite facade

of some building, and ask the stone

to bless you?

We are not impartial.

We acknowledge some forms

of consideration.

We open for those

who adhere to our one rule

endure.

6 Infinite Thought

Listen, there is no consciousness

before birth or

after death

except the one you share

with us.

So you had best learn

how to speak to us now

without the use of signs.

Remember, there will be no hands,

except remembered hands.

No lips, no face,

except remembered face.

No legs and in fact no

appendages, except

the remembered ones,

which always hurt

as consciousness hurts.

Now do you understand what it is?

Your consciousness

is the itch, the ghost of consciousness,

remembered

from how it felt

to be one of us.