Change Always Comes
Changes always come, and so might the desires for transformation shaping the struggles of Indigenous Peoples in North America. Butcher provides poetic reflections on Native and other peoples struggling for justice, which shall emerge clothed in new wings of possibility, ready to fly.
Change always comes.
This is the Natural Law.
Sometimes as a whisper or a wind,
shifting from east to west,
blowing across a vast ocean.
Sometimes it comes predictably
at turn of leaves in autumn,
seemingly imperceptible
in lands of oaks, pines, and cypress.
Sometimes change comes
as dance of unknown,
like ballet of fog and sun
on a summer’s day In Monterey.
The metamorphosis, in-between stage,
of morphing from caterpillar to monarch
is filled with mercurial mystery and uncertainty.
Joy Harjo says we’re all in this stage now,
the “chrysalis stage” --where everything
breaks down. We no longer know our own
parameters, but may emerge with wings.
Everyone shall speak their stories into
the field, the dream, and Cypress
next to our house, standing tall through
all changes, remembers what has
been spoken in Her presence.
Adobe once inhabited by John Steinbeck
still holds his stories, so why should
all edifices decorated with every
nations’ flags forget those who’ve passed
through her halls?
Native people who once lived on this
land are remembered in mural
on these walls, where their dreams
live on. They still live here.
Oaks remember them.
Cypress remembers us all.
All dreams, visions, great words
spoken inside and outside these
walls are passed down--not forgotten.
We are in the chrysalis stage of
unknowing, fertile time of
becoming something new, still
remembering where we came
from, emerging with glorious glistening
new wings of possibility, ready to fly.
Marie Butcher (aka Marie Boucher) is the Poet Laureate of Monterey County and just recently published a multilingual poetry anthology entitled, "Doves Born of Flames." She is a Judicial Board (JKB) Committee Member and English Professor leading the English for Academic and Professional Purposes (EAPP) programme at Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS).