Ceremony
You fall apart
When you do not share ceremony with others
When you do not enter the waters
with prayers swimming in your body
When you do not dance your body into a reverie
And your mind awake with moon dust
A trance in the back of your hands
That turns you slowly to greet all four directions
You fall apart
When you do not go to spinning wheel with your siblings
Weaving
Remembering
Vats of cream still churning under your feet
The origins of star stories above you
You fall apart
when the old rituals
Become forgotten
Connecting you to the flame
in your fingers, in the candle,
In the hearth, in the center
of your heart
You fall apart
When the songs your great great great grandmother sang
Disappeared in the air
You fall apart
When you lose the names of your newly dead, your ancient dead
Your ancestors who chanted into consciousness
changing the courses of rivers
Who lived humble and precious with the earth
You fall apart
When the sibling you loved
Threw himself off a building
And the other hung himself from a tree
And you go on living
Pretending that maybe
none of this ever occurred
And such was
as it always is
groomed to be
Existing within the
grinding noise
of keep on moving
You fall apart
Because life was not strong
enough to hold them here
And you do not remember
how to wail for your dead
Ripping the flowers from
Your hair
For the river
To carry down
Like tears
We are all made from
