A Sioux Prayer
A SIOUX PRAYER
Grandfather Great Spirit
All over the world the faces of living ones
    are alike.
With tenderness they have come up out
    of the ground.
Look upon your children that they may
face the winds and walk the good road to
    the Day of Quiet.
Grandfather Great Spirit
Fill us with the Light.
Give us the strength to understand,
and the eyes to see.
Teach us to walk the soft Earth as relatives
    to all that live.
September 20th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Thank you April for the Sioux Prayer and for keeping the message before us
The wisdom of the Sioux expressed in the Sioux Prayer still survives in the tumult and turmoil of today’s America.
It might be more correct to say i barely survives.
Yet as long as it barely survives the flicker mayyet turn into a flame and the flame into a fire and maybe the great grandchildren of our great grandchildren will inherit a planet where these teachings enlighten and enable all to walk the soft earth as relatives to all that live.
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s two poems below that reflect our times:
Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye | September 16, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus http://www.fpif.org
Aziz
My father
who was always my father
not always my father
Refugee
not always
once a confident schoolboy
strolling slow Jerusalem streets
He knew the alleyways
spoke to stones
All his life he would pick up stones
pocket them
line them in his sunny Texas windowsill
On some he drew
faces
What do we say in the wake of one
who was always homesick?
Are you home now?
Is Palestine peaceful in some dimension
we can’t see?
Do Jews and Arabs share the table?
Is holy in the middle?
The News
How I miss my dad when Karen Hughes or Condoleeza Rice
come on the screen – his favorites – the great experts on foreign
policy – he mocked their platitudes. I miss his sorrowful gaze
to the side at commercials, especially after scenes of places he knew,
terraced orchards, stone villages, and knew the world didn’t want to know.
His letters keep unscrolling in my mind.
Dear Militant, I know you were more likely
a heartbroken boy who lost a brother or father
and struggled all your poor life to get a grip,
but they called you a militant
the minute they killed you
so they could get away with it.
Just want you to know – I know –
and I’m sorry for your suffering.
Dear Soldier with a Tank and Many Guns,
You look more like a militant to me – actually.
They say you’re working for security when
you terrify women and wreck houses
and treat my people so rudely –
you like to feel secure while doing it.
Just want you to know – I know –
And from the side of things I’m on right now –
the disembodied side, the bigger picture side,
it looks stranger
than ever.
Aziz.
Naomi Shihab Nye is a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus and the author of more than 20 volumes of poetry, including You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East; Fuel (1998), Red Suitcase (1994), and Hugging the Jukebox (1982).
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