Remembering Our Humanity - Peter Fonken

[Larry Robinson]


Remembering Our Humanity


Down here it is cold,

but overhead, the stars are bright,

and an insistent wind

tumbles down from the mountains

with the certainty of changing seasons,

and little for it to bend

but soft flesh.

By day, the vast plains of bitter dust

belong to the ghost dancers,

their tall figures rising

with shocked hair and staffs held high,

moving to the rhythm of another world,

a drumbeat they share

only with the wind.

At night, though, different spirits rise

and take flight across the vastness,

as we huddle beneath our blankets

on jumbled stones.

The whistling of wings,

and the soft cries of another generation,

lift from the hidden waters

and wheel southward

in the long-choreographed dance

of countless nights.

It does not take a trained ear

to tell the soft “tu-hu” of the swan

from the guttural cry of the sandhill crane,

or the cacophony of snow geese.

so that they may be heard.

I have always gone to the forgotten places,

These are sounds that reside inside of us,

and resonate in our bones

when we remember our humanity.

They are as familiar as our breath,

or a baby’s cry,

and require only that we be silent and still

those that are harsh, difficult, and distant,

and inhospitable to human life,

not from a need to test myself

but because they are places

where I can listen and not forget.

Where I can hear the wild’s call

and remember that I don’t want to live

in a world where the salmon don’t swim

up their rivers,

not because I will never again taste

their sweet flesh,

or miss the beauty

of the way their bodies flash,

but because I don’t think I could bear

the grief of the forests

at the absence of their song.

Another wave of wings pass,

silhouetted against the moonlit sky.

Swans again,

and I weep with the beauty

and the knowing that in my lifetime

they could be gone.

I carry that grief

in the back of my heart,

as a coal, as a fire,

so I do not forget.

And so, we return, again and again,

to the places of beauty and discomfort,

the high cold mountains and blazing canyons,

having made our vows to remembering our humanity,

to remembering our small place in the vast dream,

righting, if only for a moment,

the misconception

that we are grand.

	- Peter Fonken