Letter from the Shaman: The Tribe with No Myth - David Citino

[Larry Robinson]

Letter from the Shaman: The Tribe with No Myth

In their territory there lived
no gods or consorts, seraphim or trolls,
no sky-father or earth-mother.
Snakes were snakes, women women
and men no more or less.
Rivers, tors and groves were mere features
of topography. Those few who cared
to gaze into the sky at night
would do so, no questions asked.
They understood that the moon
waxed and waned for no apparent reason
but science, and the stars
spinning at random formed
quite by accident what other tribes
in their frenzied stupors
swore were signs, prey and hunter,
lovers, haters, daughters and sons.
The earth perhaps was flat,
perhaps not. What did it matter
in the end? Folk without lore,
no one could remember. They recognized
no grandparents among the beasts and birds:
some were good to eat; some not;
while others were to be feared
purely for practical reasons,
poison, talon, crush and fang.
They made no distinction between raw, cooked.
Time didn't count. Dreams never meant.
Coming of age was precisely when
the night before the hairless young 
couldn't bleed or grow erect as spears,
couldn't conceive, while the day after
they could. Their fires burned slowly,
with no stories to feed the flames.
When it came time for them to go
there was no talk of planting,
no songs of fear or yearning
they would rise to walk again
among the living. Their dead were dead.
In this land lovers loved
because it seemed a good idea,
all things being equal.
Patternless, drifting from one fire 
to the next, one coupling,
the tribe came apart, each woman and man
rational as hell, creatures
of wandering. And their children
wander among us still today,
drifting, missing but not quite lost.

	- David Citino