Sunday, February 12, 2023

Martha Ronk



 

"Scraps of Indigenous History"


scratched hinterlands and the far-flung    cased behind glass

collected in multiples        piecemeal and over time

stitched with fishing twine          housed in museum vaults

the ongoing       catapulted into waters moving out to

unfinished sentences        songs of smoke       marks on clay

a leg lifted in a dance       no one remembers

land lived on is only for feet         dusty imprints blown away

a headdress      woven      feathered        ribbon-trimmed

beauty seared into skin         tattooed stripes on the chin

scripts of uninformed information          eluded, erased

land forms      left snake-like       telling us in what dialect

anonymous was what      was Wiyot       was imprinted with a map

was dark of face    was blue unborn       was landlocked

was unnamed       was pictured only as the unseen

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