Mary

“She worries about what people say and how they see us. It makes her angry, but she wrings dough instead of her hands.”
― Rena Rossner, The Sisters of the Winter Wood

“Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer

I climb the black rock mountain
Stepping from day to day,
Silently,
I smell the wind for my ancestors
pale blue leaves
crushed wild mountain smell.
Returning
up the gray stone cliff
where I descended
a thousand years ago.
Returning to faded black stone
Where mountain lions lay down with deer.
It is better to stay up here
watching wind’s reflection
in tall yellow flowers.

How I danced in snow-frost moonlight
distant stars to the end of the Earth,

How I swam away
in freezing mountain water
narrow mossy canyon tumbling down
out of the mountain
out of deep canyon stone
down
the memory
spilling out
into the world.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller