At Haak’u
Within the community,
on the land, in it, and of it,
there is a way in all things
that Acoma (Haak’u) children are taught.
Shadruukaʾàatuunísṿ
It is a way of saying.
It is a way of saying our life and the way
things grow and grow. It is a way of saying
the children are growing so quickly. It is a way
of saying the plants, which we so lovingly care
for in the fields, are growing and growing.
It is a way of saying neither would grow and grow
without
our love.
Amuu’u haats’i. It is a way of saying our beloved life.
Our beloved land.
Our beloved children and community.
Sráamí. It is not always easy. And we, the People, the
Hánʾu are not always good and right. But the right and good
way is the way
that we go that we might live. Srâutsʾímʾv. Srâutsʾímʾv, say
the Ancestors, our old ones, speaking up from the land
from the rivers, in and through the rain, and all the cycles
of the earth we know. Srâutsʾímʾv, children. Do you know
just how much we love you and are praying for your lives?

This is the world
so vast and lonely
without end, with mountains
named for men
who brought hunger
from other lands,
and fear
of the thick, dark forest of trees
that held each other up,
knowing fire dreamed of swallowing them
and spoke an older tongue,
and the tongue of the nation of wolves
was the wind around them.
Even ice was not silent.
It cried its broken self
back to warmth.
But they called it
ice, wolf, forest of sticks,
as if words would make it something
they could hold in gloved hands,
open, plot a way
and follow.

This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.
This is what I know from science:
that a grain of dust dwells at the center
of every flake of snow,
that ice can have its way with land,
that wolves live inside a circle
of their own beginning.
This is what I know from blood:
the first language is not our own.

There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.