The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no centre any longer and the sacred tree is dead.
-Black Elk of the Sioux

1
Someone was walking in the room next door.
I thought the house was empty, but it seemed
someone was pacing round the bedroom floor

a moment since. His footsteps crossed my dreams
as I was waking; sunlight bleached the wall,
and on the other side, no doubt, it gleamed

upon his space. Each step rang hard and small:
a slow, deliberate measurement of pain.
At times these old, familiar sounds appal,

at times it seems the morning light is strained
from utter blackness. Yet I bear it all:
the scattered hoop, the poison in the grain,

and naked angels, shattered in the fall.
My own steps echo in an empty hall.
...