<html aria-label="message body"><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother Church No. 3</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 14px;"><i><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Kletso/Yellow House</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Chaco Canyon, San Juan County, New Mexico</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Anasazi Ruins, AD 1125-1130</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">for Henri, at 2</span></i></span><div><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><i><br></i></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">You step down into the Flat World</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Then ask me to say it, to explain</span><br><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">How our name can mean both ancestor</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">And enemy. Your body begins in four directions.</span><br><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Here, one calendar takes eighteen years.</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I am three. One day is an eyelash.</span><br><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Your body is a segment of prehistoric road,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">A buried stairwell with only the top stair obvious.</span><br><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">We are alluvial, obsidian.</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Sometimes the ground swells</span><br><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">With disappointment; sometimes we know our mountains</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Will be renamed after foreign saints.</span><br><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">We sing nine-hundred-year-old hymns</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">That instruct us in how to sit still</span><br><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">For forty-nine years</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Through a fifty-year drought.</span><br><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">We climb down through the hole anyway,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">And agree to the arrangement.</span><br><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Robin Coste Lewis</span></div></div></body></html>