issue 17, 1995
The Ceremony of Peyote
I was weight and heavy with water.
An Anhinga, snake-bird,
a long dark form silhouetted
on the porch-roof of the hogan.
She came to me out
of a monsoon sky.
Horizontals banded thickly:
orange, red and gray.
Snake-bird in me.
Curving slowly above our bed.
I am nine months full of water and scent:
sweat, garlic and cumin,
a smell of moisture and Gila clay.
I’m a brown and black puddle,
a scent I know.
You spent hours during the heat
explaining the meaning of three
enamel spoons, lined up in matching bowls:
corn, meat and berries.
Morning food is always like that, you said.
As if to remind me
if I should ever bring water
through the door, from the east,
after a prayer to a feathered-serpent star.
I think my morning prayers
are only suitable for hopes of waterbirds,
anhingas and herons—
not heaven men
or women in pan-Indian shawls.
I am nobody
to the church-going kind.
But if I go with you I’d say:
I do it because of its symbol,
a microsecond of meaning I might
impart, sounding like a voice,
reflecting a useful conscious.
Signaling to me
to anyone
to hear a moment
of an idea, a sincere emotion
unrestricted to you out there
who’d listen and pause.
————
Author’s Statement — This poem emerged from embodied life experiences over years of immersion in Native American Church ceremonies. It reflects my insights drawn from this sacred ritual and how it heightened in my consciousness on motherhood, my protector role for my son, and a deeper knowing of the edges of precarious exploitability that Indigenous women experience across spaces where colonial power relationships still very much inhabit the minds, bodies, spirits and languages of those seeking healing. It is experimental in Indigenous poetic futurism in that it enacts Indigenous literary sovereignty by structuring form, line breaks, and cadence to the sound-scape of the peyote ceremony, and specifically, to the “Morning Prayer”, which is traditionally spoken by an Indigenous woman whose role, including praying for all beings in the sacred Circle, is also to guide the ceremonial participant’s spirit-mind-body toward grounded ways to walk the peyote teachings of love, truth, kindness, generosity, reciprocity and responsibility to self, children, youth, family, and community.
Margo Tamez (she/her) is a Ndé Dene [Lipan Apache, Dene nation] poet and historian. Born in Kónítsaįįgokíyąą, (Big Water Peoples’ Country; S & SW Texas and northeastern Mexico)., Tamez is the author of FATHER | GENOCIDE (2021), Raven Eye (2007), Naked Wanting (2003), and Alleys & Allies (1991). Her poetry has recently appeared in Chapter House Journal, Poetry Daily, Split This Rock, nominated for Best of the Net (2021), and FATHER | GENOCIDE is a finalist for the Big Other book award (2022). She is an Associate Professor in the Indigenous Studies and the MFA (Poetry) programs at the University of British Columbia, Unceded Syilx territory. www.margotamez.com.