Markings on Earth Ms. Karenne Wood'

Markings on Earth

At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. —Chief Seattle

Ten thousand years of history, and we find the remains
of ancestors removed from their burial mound, where stones
sank into the welcoming grasses and would
have stayed, sentinels over a shrine to the spirits
entombed there, but the river changed course. It did not save
these bones—it was lifting them out of the earth.

Nine hundred years before us, fifty generations, the earth-
diggers, Monacans, knew the land and buried what remained
of their families in thirteen known mounds. The dead were safe
where they lay, until, at an appointed time, we lifted stones
and carried our relatives to sacred ground. Releasing their spirits
required four nights of music and fire, the dark wood

charred into ash. We reburied them by a dogwood
grove, our mound rising, fifteen feet of earth
and Monacan bones. Encompassed in mist, its spirits
lifted toward the sky. Of the mound, what now remains
but a small hump, plowed down, the ceremonial stones
thrown away? So little is left us—nothing really, save

those few who listen with their blood, who might save
our people. Scientists, sifting through dirt for the scars of wood
postholes, tell us how to reconstruct our homes. Stone
axes, chipped flints, potsherds: we locate our markings on earth.
As the only descendants of a nation, we remain
to find ancestors stored in warehouses, bagged, labeled, their spirits

neglected, dust pressing over their bones in the spirit
of historical research. We are left among ruins to save
what we can, our grandparents who did not depart but remain
among us, as we may remain after nine hundred years. We would
bring them home, give their bones to the cradle of earth,
their songs and ours quivering through the stone.

We are their families, weeping for stones
we cannot find, for the blue shroud of spirit
rising like breath, for the tattered earth
we recognize but have not been able to save,
remembering stones, rivers, hills, dogwoods,
spirits. We are safe, for now. The earth and sky remain.

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