Bucket Moon
After a night of high winds and blizzard conditions and a day of chasing nearly a foot of snow off driveways and sidewalks, I sat well into the night watching a bucket moon silently arc across the icy black sky. There was a line from a poem written by a native American that says; “When the moon is turned upwards like a bowl waiting to be filled We must fill it.” This was written while the young poet was attending boarding school run by white missionary's whose mission from their God and their government was to, “eradicate the heathen Indian culture, once and for all.”
I thought what it must be like to be abruptly taken from your parents' side, your aunts and uncles and nephews, your woodland lodge, your prairie tepee, your garden patch and your berry patch, your place by the fire and your place in the universe. You lay on your side facing a smudged and frosty window pane, under you a thin, limp mattress, and over you an even thinner blanket. There is no heat.
Outside the snow has quit falling and the howling wind is left to chase the last few flakes into drifts between the buildings and the stacks of prairie hay. With your fists clenching the blanket under your chin and your knees drawn to your chest, you notice not the cold, but only the moon, the bowl moon. You remember the words of your aunt, “Never waste a bowl moon”. She said, “stay up all the night if you must, but put all that you have and all that has you into the bowl” It was only as you grew older did you begin to fully understand that she meant for you to take those things which you highly prized having as a possession, as well as those things you had allowed to take possession of you and to take each one and, lifting it up, place it deep inside the bucket moon while simultaneously whispering it name. Her aunt was emphatic that she whispered the name...if it had no name it was to be given a name. But nothing went into the bowl nameless.
So she laid there and let her mind drift from one image from the past to the next, after whispering the name of each she placed it in the bucket moon. As the moon came closer and closer to the horizon her mind turned toward the darker things, the things that while not spoken, were preoccupying her thoughts; What if she lost her memories? What if through focusing on the present she forgot her past? What if focusing on acquiring the shiny things now, she lost the memory of the smell of a warming lodge fire, the texture of a buffalo robe on a cold winter's night, the trance inducing chant of the Red Moon Dance??? With the earliest streaks of dawn’s light barely visible to the east, the bucket moon slid over the horizon and she drifted into sleep, her lips barely moving as she chanted the sacred words of the red moon dance.
poppie
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