Sun Series

By Santana Shorty

Sunrise, 
accept this offering. 
Sunrise. 

 –From Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko

Part I: Sunsetting

The end is full of waiting. 

Of willful meandering. 

The kind that compels you to put candles of too many varieties into your cart, despite your fear of fire. 

There is moxie in doing something you don’t want to. 

In finding feral. 

In seeking an unachievable solace. 

At the windowsill, sitting at the battered and water-stained pane, you will notice your breath is too shallow to properly fog your view. 

Tea is tasteless. 

Coffee is too sharp for your tongue. 

The outdoors is calling but you cannot keep warm. 

And when you are looking for the cure, a cure, any cure, you will look back and be astonished by your own unwillingness to believe. 

Part II: Sunlight

There is a clinking sound when I remove the worn, hand-me-down plate from Mama. 

The reflective cast and orbital shine it sheds on your jawline is luminous.

I stare. 

How its half-lit light creates a moon on your face and I realize the galaxy is sitting at my kitchen table. 

Part III: Sun Mountain

The miracle of living. 

Of catching a prism in the eye – to have the gift of blindness for only a few spark moments. 

The sun-felt sprawl of erosion and basalt rock. 

I am porous. 

Am wilting under the fainting feeling that is being grounded and roofed for too long. 

I have been carrying rocks from the Pacific Ocean in my many threaded pockets and here they tell me they are home. 

When I walk 

Up

Cactus needles lean forward to catch my hand and I do not pull away. 

My foot slips on the mountain’s worn grain and I meet the earth more than once. 

My water is in the car, but I know I will not be thirsty when I reach the top. 

How is it

That with each step

I push down 

I am lifted up? 

Can I call this flight? 

Part IV: Sunrisen 

I am gathering the parts. 

At the fifth post of the newly sown barbed wire fence, in the backfield, next to the oldest peach tree on the property, there is one. 

In the back wheel well of my mother’s silver Prius, which she uses to transport groceries and alfalfa, goats and grandchildren, there is another. 

The third was harder to find. 

It was nestled, like a newborn kitten, blinking and wild, beneath the patchwork flagstone porch of my new home. 

And last was the sacred fourth. 

It came to me, unbidden, unwanted at the time. 

It sat, both squat and tall, a sentry in the pillowy ashes of my father’s woodstove, the morning after the coldest night of the year. 

I keep them in a lacquered, honey toned box, which I dust monthly. 

They hum. 

Vibrating a holy frequency that I can only hear in the pink morning before my dreams have left me. 

Or the night it snowed four inches, after Spring threatened her pollen-clad backhand for a week, surprising us as it always does to no one’s surprise. 

The whales are singing so loud, we hear them from our desert perch. 

White light is making us sick and weepy. 

Forests groan, brown and fibrous, under the weight of smoke and gases that were meant to stay below.

I do not want to write another poem about the earth’s fetid ending. 

But all the parts have come to me at a time we cannot call coincidence, don’t you dare. 

I disrespectfully decline the demise. 

I refuse fear in all its opulent and chaotic forms. 

For I have medicine embedded in the printed patterns of my palms. 

I have feathers braided through the pines of my hair. 

And I have the parts, in their almighty and wayward forms, 

Ready to protect us when needed. 

But first,

We must,

“Accept this offering.”

—

Santana Shorty is a writer and poet from northern New Mexico. She received her BA from Stanford University and MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing has been published in New Mexico Magazine, El Palacio magazine, and Water Bodies: Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth (Torrey House Press). She is working on her first novel. She is a member of the Navajo Nation and lives in Santa Fe.