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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Lance Henson

Poems

So alone
Even their pain abandoned them ...
Knowing their pain was the pain of the world ...
They waited for its return ...

Their light still tremoring

Within them ...
(Entities. From the Stronghold, 23/12/21)

Just before dawn

Where I thought I heard you call my name

Wind forming patterns of beings in the wintered trees

Gray mist rising on the back of a sleeping wolf ...

Far from where demons wait

As the temperature drops to its knees

We watch from our hidden balcony

Inside a veil of rain ...

Men folding themselves into paper planes that cannot fly ...
(Entities. From the Stronghold, 22/02/22)

And there
Behind our eyes
Nets of light

Folds of consciousness at rest
Upon a floating field of brightened memories ...
That dim at the shoreline
Where the ships of the dead are drifting ...
(Entities. The War Poems, 26/3/22)

Here is a place where nothing can die
Darkness that lives beneath the leaves

We bring our nights there without knowing
We bring our fear there before the singing begins
We bring our silent names there hoping we are forgiven

We bring our hands there scented of a river

We bring our prayers that hide and watch us
The landscape where we have held the loose feathers
Of a fallen bird

And awakened in the land of the unseen

Here is a place where nothing can die ...
(Bologna 24/05/22)

At the well of solitude
Where the dead and the living link hands ...

We see when the clouds open and the sun
Shines through

They are smiling ...

Whispering of windows shuttered
On an unknown plain ...

The ones with ghosted eyes
stand

Within our dreamtime
to watch ...
The bones melt on the window pane ...

And the one song that has followed us
All this way ...

Is playing ...
(Poem for not turning away, Bologna 13/01/23)

Here is the place where the ones who have vanished awaken us

This is the place where dreams come to die she said
A veil of ashes falling through her voice ...

My grandfather told me removing a screwdriver from the heart of a river
You are surrounded by eternity ...

Whispering a prayer away from men my grandmother spoke the word veho<fnref n="1" /> ...

She looked at me lighting
A camel cigarette

The words they use have dead eyes

Memory is the shadow that stays ...

*Eh maiyun ah huhta<fnref n="2" /> ...*

*(A spirit whispered this to me in dream)*

Walking badger dog soldier said this ...

*(To Nob and Bertha Cook, *Entities. From the Stronghold*)*

**Vo'e<fnref n="3" />**
These are the ones who enfold light
Causing it to strike the earth

<footnote n="1">¹ *Veho* in Cheyenne refers to “White Man” and to the black widow spider. The Cheyennes named white people after *veho*, territorial and deadly like the spider.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² “A spirit whispered this to me in dream”.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Cheyenne for clouds.</footnote>
The ones who
Caress silence
Their older sister

The ones that hover over
The wintering water

The ones who spin
Their angry eye upon us

The ones who gather above us
As we dream

These are the ones who unfurl
The grown moon ...

Entities

Raven watching
Words float by
Words without wings

Dreams on fire at the edge
Of a winter camp
In a soup of blood and ash ...

Eh maiyun ah huhta

You will see only one of you
Without eyes ...
Singing in a weeping rain ...

Dog Soldier Song

When hunger and fear left them
To search for other ones

They turned to one another lying down

Lights shimmering still
Within them

Now the wind arrives scented of rainfall
And evening opens
Its shadowed palm

Who will speak within the language of the other

While the folded birds in the burning forest sing ...
(To Olga Hiiva, Russian artist, *Entities. From the Stronghold* 22/02/22)

Five Poems for Ritsos

I first read your words in an Oklahoma
Rainstorm in 1968
Now I am here with
Drifting birds in sea wind
Water jars of clay

Cretan knives
Small poems on the handles
And a photograph
Women in black holding
Their diminished dreams
In their aprons

A mauve light upon your weathered face
In the prison where
Your bowl of watered grains
Rotted under the windowed moon

Your resistance an ochre
Color of grace
Rises again
In this troubled time

As a tolling bell
Bursting upon the eternal sea wind
My brother
Nothing can defeat the human heart ...
(In island of Crete, 14/06/2009)

**Lance Henson** is a Cheyenne headman of the dog soldier clan, Sundancer and member of the Native American church of Oklahoma. He has 41 books published and translated into more than 25 languages. He currently lives in Bologna, Italy.
[lancehens@gmail.com](mailto:lancehens@gmail.com)