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