Poetry Sunday: The History of Red by Linda Hogan

This past week I was inspired to look at poetry written by Native Americans and that is how I came to meet Linda Hogan.

Hogan is an award-winning, much-honored Chickasaw essayist, novelist, poet, environmentalist and eco-feminist. Her writings reflect her political and spiritual concerns and often deal with the environment, with historical narratives including oral histories, and with the relocation of Native Americans.

I came across this poem of hers which I particularly liked. It resonated with me, I think, because I grew up in the red clay hills of Northeast Mississippi, part of the ancestral home of the Chickasaws. Red clay like "the human clay whose blood we still carry." I hope you will find it meaningful, too.  

The History of Red

by Linda Hogan

First

there was some other order of things

never spoken

but in dreams of darkest creation.

Then there was black earth,

lake, the face of light on water.

Then the thick forest all around

that light,

and then the human clay

whose blood we still carry

rose up in us

who remember caves with red bison

painted in their own blood,

after their kind.

A wildness

swam inside our mothers,

desire through closed eyes,

a new child

wearing the red, wet mask of birth,

delivered into this land

already wounded,

stolen and burned

beyond reckoning.

Red is this yielding land

turned inside out

by a country of hunters

with iron, flint and fire.

Red is the fear

that turns a knife back

against men, holds it at their throats,

and they cannot see the claw on the handle,

the animal hand

that haunts them

from some place inside their blood.

So that is hunting, birth,

and one kind of death.

Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.

Red was the infinite fruit

of stolen bodies.

The doctors wanted to know

what invented disease

how wounds healed

from inside themselves

how life stands up in skin,

if not by magic.

They divined the red shadows of leeches

that swam in white bowls of water:

they believed stars

in the cup of sky.

They cut the wall of skin

to let

what was bad escape

but they were reading the story of fire

gone out

and that was a science.

As for the animal hand on death’s knife,

knives have as many sides

as the red father of war

who signs his name

in the blood of other men.

And red was the soldier

who crawled

through a ditch

of human blood in order to live.

It was the canal of his deliverance.

It is his son who lives near me.

Red is the thunder in our ears

when we meet.

Love, like creation,

is some other order of things.

Red is the share of fire

I have stolen

from root, hoof, fallen fruit.

And this was hunger.

Red is the human house

I come back to at night

swimming inside the cave of skin

that remembers bison.

In that round nation

of blood

we are all burning,

red, inseparable fires

the living have crawled

and climbed through 

in order to live

so nothing will be left

for death at the end.

This life in the fire, I love it.

I want it,

this life.