Twenty years ago we took our young family to Mesa Verde National Park, where we marveled at ancient desert cliff dwellings, and to Four Corners, where the states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet at a point marked with a brass cap and monument.  We walked from one American Indian artisan’s tent to another to another, admiring their skill and craft.  I lingered over a beautiful object, which the Navajo artist explained was a medicine wheel.  With some prompting, she told me of its symbolism and meaning.  I offered to type up the story, which she could copy onto a business card for her customers.  I bought the medicine wheel, mailed her the typed story, and dangled the medicine wheel from my staff.  I do no remember her name, sadly symbolic of how much suffering this country’s indigenous peoples have endured, and of how much they and their craft and their culture have been forgotten.  Twenty years later, I have written this poem.

MEDICINE WHEEL

four corners
mark a spot of rusty desert
a greening brass cap

dusty canopies
cover black hair plaited
long, smiles wanting, waiting
behind wares, soft eyes

I gaze long:
a crossed circle worked
with leather and bone beads
feathers dangle
              It is the medicine wheel.
I nod and gaze and question

              The medicine wheel shows
       Mother Earth
around us-beneath us-above us
       Paths of Life
on Earth-through Earth-under Sun
       Great Spirit: in all

The medicine wheel brings healing to believer and seeker

I offer to type this up
for her
on a card
maybe, to give
to her customers

          if you want….

I have forgotten
her name

Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road.  The book tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human spirit.  The book is available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.