Many Thanks, Simon, for a Wonderful Gift

When I think of traveling between past and future, bringing things I value with me, there's a poem by Simon Ortiz that I always think of. He wrote it as the seventh of his "Forming Child" poems (it is among the poems in his great collection Woven Stone), at a time when one of his children was forming in the mother's womb:

7th ONE

Near the summit, SE of Kinlichee,
I saw a piece of snowmelt water
that I thought would maybe look good
on a silver bracelet with maybe
two small turquoise stones at its sides;
but then, I liked the way it was, too,
under pine trees, the snow feeding it,
the evening sunlight slanting off it,
and I knew that you would understand
why I decided to leave it like that.

(44)

This has not yet been canonized as one of the great poems of our age, but it will be—though, for Simon's sake, I hope not for many years, since it is much harder to write great poems when people are telling you what a great poet you are and wanting you to write more poems just like those that came before. We like what we know, and we want the same when it comes to our favorite poems and songs: play it again, Simon! But what he has done here is to keep that memory of a particular place and time, that track of his past, and hand it over to the child. He has "left it like that," and yet he has also taken it as a gift to the child yet unborn. He has given it to anyone who can read or hear the English language and shares the gift of human sight and feelings. It is a turquoise and silver bracelet put into words, but as with the real silver and turquoise work of Pueblo people, it is also the mountain, snow-water, pine trees—the natural world—that are invited to come and live in the work of silversmith or wordsmith, who can craft a story with a little world inside it like good medicine, getting across its human and natural and divine gift of meaning.