The Day the Order Changed
Our daughters hid,
our mothers passed away,
our wives faded without a voice,
our stories choked in tomorrows
as yesterday stole away.
Locked in our bodies
tightened in our spirits
fastened in our strands,
our world closes.
Songs of my heart
become screams of betrayal,
bereavement becomes me.
A stone turns
and this new earth
becomes my prison.
Places in my heart
are my Daughters of beauty;
the future creators.
I reach but cannot change
what has begun.
Mothers of wisdom,
holders of visions and care,
I cry out
and the echo resounds.
Wives; the very centre
sowers of the Earth and the Moon,
keepers of the family,
Locked into a square
our circle disappears
on the day the order changed.
Newness
is now told in a pose.
Women, now a flesh mask.
Women and Earth - places of creation,
now sold and used
as if a winter could buy a summer,
the air could consume the wind,
or the water possess the blue open skies.
The water can only mimic the sky
in its beauty & spirit,
be moved by the wind
or frozen and warmed by the air.
Mother Earth knows
where things begin and end.
If she didn't
we would surely die.
The day the order changed
no one heard our cries
our words, our ways
for they were forced out from inside.
The language of brother Wolf as he howls to the sky
would never force out the songs from the winged ones,
nor would he try to change the sweet melodies up high,
to his lonesome lament to the moon.
That is the order of Mother Earth
as she respects all who reside living together side by side.
Animals were our brothers and our sisters
keeping us warm and fed, in earth's family living side by side.
Not caging up brother for mom's fun,
or testing mother's spray on sister's hide,
nor injecting baby brother with diseases, in the name of health
not duplicating sister so she can multiply
or killing off brother to take his ivories
and as this order descends
brother vulture waits at our head.
LauraLee K. Harris
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