The Lesson

image borrowed from bing

The Lesson

“It is a beggar’s pride that he is not a thief.”

----Japanese proverb.

He chose to live alone,

building his hogan on an exposed ridge,

where he could enjoy creating humungous bonfires

and have a panoramic view of the night sky. 

It was the time of Rityok,

when Winter was nearly exhausted,

but far from spent, as one night

it raised a ruckus because it could,

filling the darkness with a terrible howling,

tinged with tiotypen thunder, crackling

like dropping boulders on dinosaur eggs,

piercing the thick Swaboll hides that were

stretched tight over the pine spines

of his structure, rolling relentlessly

like a runaway herd of corsores,

heads down, blindly trampling

everything in their shaggy path.

At midnight the elder Tribiluk,

had a belly full of the roaring

as he stepped outside, grateful to be wearing

triple-thick branak hides--as swarms

of indifferent hail pellets pounded at his body,

chilling him to the bone, standing tall

and shivering in Winter’s maw.

“I am Votok,”  he yelled, his voice sounding tiny,

“As Shaman I demand that you cease this onslaught

so that I may sleep!”

“You are nothing, not worthy of notice, less

than a flyspeck beneath my wrath,”

moaned the wild wind through frozen teeth,

sending bevies of ice slivers to stab at his face;

“Never forget that I am the god of wind,

the master of storms, and I will

have my way with you!”

followed by blinding flashes of branch lightning

and deafening peals of thunder

that sounded like cruel laughter.

The old man sank to his knees, bowing deeply,

his three condor feathers bending back flat,

his colorful ribbons being pasted wetly

to his hunched shoulders. 

He fled back to his ring of stones,

to his small evening fire, pulling

the thick mountain sheepskin blankets

up to his dark angry eyes,

his arms cramping from clenched fists,

and was not aware of just when he had slipped

off to sleep, after the wind had become merely

a song and his futility had ebbed.

Glenn Buttkus

June 2013

Posted over on dVerse Poet Poetics

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