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SPIRIT
LODGE
LIBRARY
Medicine
Wheel
Page
15
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(Main
Links of the site are right at the bottom of the page)
The 24 pages in this Medicine Wheel section are linked below
Raven Moon
By Minna
Raven Moon by Anita Endrezze …
Adapted from a Northwest coast legend
In First People's sky there is no
moon.
The shaman stirs the vigil fires;
vague nights confuse the spirit's travels.
The smell of seaweed,
pickled red and brown in its own dark brine,
awakens the napping girl,
her fingers lazily burrowing into heavy warm loam.
Behind her,
the tangle of thin, damp briers.
The island's trees and shrubs hug tight the coastal rocks.
At her feet,
small silver fish flash like crescents in the foam.
Into pools of water stones,
loosened berries fall like red fish eggs.
She is the shaman's daughter,
the keeper of Moon and its Light.
She is the Girl with Medicine Eyes.
Raven's eyes lock tight in her skull.
His magic is sly.
From the berry thicket,
a spiraling leaf blesses her tongue.
Nestled in her womb, it grows.
When the child is born,
his nose is beaked.
Earth Children tremble,
birds fly in circles.
Tides bend toward the woman's lodge where the moon is a pale
secret.
The baby screams unceasingly.
She is ready to tear out her long black hair.
She contemplates its noose-like possibilities.
The shaman plugs his ears.
His beady-eyed grandson caws,
wrapped in a blanket of cedar.
The girl is desperate.
Inside the braided basket
is a box, still as a cloud.
Box within a box within a box each painted,
inlaid with pearled abalone shell and whale bone.
Lifting the Moon netting,
she shakes out fringes of deer hooves and puff in beaks,
tossing the Moon to her wild-eyed son.
He balances the milky sphere between crooked lips.
He is quiet for a moment
then
he wails, shrieks, squawks (she
is so tired!) points to the boarded smoke hole.
Exhausted, she opens it.
Like black water,
Night falls into her hands,
spilling into the lodge corners.
Her son smiles, sings,
pulling feathers from under his skin,
shaking out wings, blue-black, strong.
With Moon in his beak,
Raven flies out,
flinging it past his curving wings,
far up into the sky.
Moon settles slowly,
an embryo in Night Maiden's belly.
In the village,
the shaman's daughter swallows the empty Moon boxes where,
like nesting hearts,
they enclose her emptiness.
When she dies,
set adrift in cold waters,
shrouded in a blanket of Red Moons,
her body is guarded by gulls.
Raven listens, whistling in stunted trees.
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Libraries
are on this row
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INDEX
Page 3
(Main Section, Medicine Wheel, Native Languages &
Nations, Symbology)
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INDEX
Page 5
(Sacred Feminine & Masculine, Stones & Minerals)
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©
Copyright: Cinnamon Moon & River WildFire Moon (Founders.)
2000-date
All rights reserved.
Site
constructed by Dragonfly
Dezignz 1998-date
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