Scent of Hope

[accompanying a gift of Braiding Sweetgrass by R.W. Kimmerer]

Chinese lights are twinkling 

and I'm in the gifting crunch.

‘Tis the season when each sunset

starts up shortly after lunch. 

Likely you’ll be groaning:

“Here he goes again,

with incessant rhyming couplets 

and long-overdue Amen!”

But recently I’ve verified,

as one observant reader:

nearly every line of Emily’s 

was in this very meter!

Blithely do I burden

the earth with one more poem

while insisting it be tethered 

to yet another tome.

At first I thought to share 

the book from work I stole:

Beyond Consequences,

Logic, and Control. 

And while providing insights

from which we all may gain,

‘tis to help adoptive parents know 

the trauma-addled brain.

While certainly this book applies 

to clients I am seeing 

it also sheds new light upon 

the core of my own being. 

For each of us sought comforts

when we felt left behind; 

once means of survival 

now our character defined.

In memories of my father 

preoccupied with boats

I see my own obsession 

with all stuff involving notes. 

In this case the trauma 

not in my past but in his;

yet somehow it infuses 

Christmas-present as it is.

I next then sought suggestions

from my favorite avid reader,

with whom I’m blessed to dwell

near madronas and a cedar. 

So taken now with sweetgrass 

she bought some, braided too—

a sacred scent reminder 

of time with Lakota-Sioux 

on a North Dakota landscape,

a liberated nation. 

For them it was existence; 

for us it was vacation. 

The spirits that they honored, 

the lodges where they sweated,

so distant from big-oil execs

with spirits tourniqueted. 

One might ask in earnest, 

after all the broken treaties,

whether these two kinds of human 

truly are of the same species. 

The book addresses arrogance 

towards planet and its creatures— 

a clueless needing to control 

those who should be our teachers—

while also offering lessons 

from the scientific view

(much as did Dad’s novel;

let’s give credit where it’s due).

Might our drinking binge of resources 

be scaled back to intinction?

Could we treat this land indigenously 

to thwart our own extinction? 

What once was labeled progress 

we now must redefine;

harness all the insights learned 

for massive redesign. 

But more than the retooling 

of the power-hungry grid,

we need to build connections 

our economy forbids:

connection to each other, 

connection to the past, 

and connection to a future 

richly scented with sweetgrass.