Dispossessed
1.
Looking from across the way
I see an arch
sculpted by seeping water
in the sandstone wall
and as I get closer
neat little houses
emerge from the shadows,
not carved in the stone,
or rounded
like swallows' nests,
but brick, four-foot-tall
and square
like above-the-ground
graves, stacked in rows
against the rock, with space
for walking on the roofs
small doors, windows,
they had to sit, back
against the wall, or lie down.
The whole pueblo, tucked
inside the alcove like a bed.
2.
These ancient people
were long in their long sleep
when the Navajo came
in the 1400’s. Still,
Anazasi, the Navajo call them,
old enemies.
3.
War or disease
drove this small band
out of the open plain
into the bottom of the canyon.
No one knows where they came from,
how long they wandered
looking for a refuge,
a resting place,
what drove them out again
after one generation.
They left as suddenly as they'd come
taking little with them
the houses open
as if they had gone to their gardens
or to hunt a deer
they'd seen across the way.
4.
People still flee like that
pursued by famine and disease,
by men with guns
on horses and camels.
They run, infants on their backs,
in their arms, the dead
buried in haste
or left behind where they fall.
In the canyon
a large midden
was found below their doors.
Shards and the remains
of baskets, stone tools
and animal bone.
The bodies of the dead.
Small people, spine
deformed by arthritis, teeth
worn by the grit
eaten with the corn.
----------Rina Ferrarelli
