What The Eagle Fan Says

Cape by Helen Smoker Martin

What the Eagle Fan Says


A poem by Carter Revard


I strung dazzling thrones
of thunder beings
on a spiraling thread
of spinning flight,
beading dawn's blood
and blue of noon
to the gold and dark
of day's leaving,
circling with sun
the soaring heaven
over turquoise eyes
of Earth below
her silver veins,
her sable fur,
heard human relatives
hunting beneath
calling me down,
crying their need
that I bring them closer
to Wakonda's ways,
and I turned from heaven
to help them then.
When the bullet came
it caught my heart,
the hunter's hands
gave Earth its blood,
loosened light beings,
and let us float
toward the sacred center
of song in the drum,
but fixed us first
firm in tree-heart
that green knife-dancers
gave to men's knives,
ash-heart in hiding where
a deer's heart had beat,
and a one-eyed serpent
with silver-straight head
strung tiny rattles
around white softness
in beaded harmonies
of blue and red --
now I move lightly
in a man's left hand,
above dancing feet
follow the sun
around old songs
soaring toward heaven
on human breath
and I help them rise.

This poem offers thanks for the honor of being given eagle feathers which were then set into a beaded fan. It tells how the eagle in flight pierces clouds just as a beadworker's needle goes through bead or buckskin, spiraling round sky or fan-handle -- and how the eagle flies from dawn to sunset, linking day and night colors as they are linked on a Gourd Dancer's blanket (half crimson, half blue), and as they are linked in the beading of the fan's handle. The poem's form is the alliterative meter used by the Anglo-Saxon tribes, and its mode is the Anglo-Saxon 'riddle,' in which mysterious names are given to ordinary things: here trees are green light-dancers, wood is tree-heart or ash-heart, clouds are thrones of thunder-beings. I hope the one-eyed serpent will find its name in the reader's memory.

Carter Revard is an Osage Indian, Rhodes scholar, and professor of medieval English literature.