For Life's Sake

Painting by Michael Keck

For Life's Sake


This morning as I sit beneath a tree,
the newly hatched spiders are leaving.
The sun shines on their strands of silk.
The barn swallows are flying back and forth
from mud to their clay nests in a world of their maps.
I can hear the deep breathing of the horses behind the trees.
On one of them the letters U. S. are frozen into the fur,
followed by symbols that will always define her, declare her,
tell her story. She, too, is another part of America,
a rounded-up creation from the wild.
And the Indian horses have a history not unlike our own.
The military, trying to round up the tribes and move them all
into Oklahoma, tried to cripple their movement by killing
all their horses, sometimes by the thousands.
It's a part of history that also makes me write.

I love the world. I love everything that lives upon it.
And so I write, like this morning under the tree.
It is a world of mystery and beauty;
this is what gives me words, and those words come from
the earth, the language of the land,
the re-membering the dismembered of the world,
as writer Meridel LeSueur called it.
I write to be one person who helps to put the world,
the lives of humans and non-humans back together,
to make them whole again. I do this for the future.
I do this for life's sake.


Linda Hogan.....excerpt from article.