NYU Black Renaissance Noire Volume 18 Issue 1 - Winter 2018 | Page 12

poetry
By Duane Niatum
Trickster
Is the first to make you smile.
He flies right into our hearts
showing he created the world
for his own amusement and ours.
Trickster shares the merry-go-round world
with us while pointing the way
we put our foot in our mouths
and our minds in the gopher hole.
Trickster, the Raven, asks us please
remember our most loved stories
shake the silliness from our lives.
Raven does a little side step, a dance
he learned from crab, showing us
the sideshow glimpses of the world
and ourselves. Raven sends laughter
and glorks floating around in waves,
the clown appearing on the stage
or at the bottom of our dreams.
We love the many-masked one
ancestors called the First Teacher.
We see ourselves grow and change
from his stories. Trickster flaps
his wings and dances down the zigzag
path so we can hold on to what life brings.
If we fall in laughter he cushions
the ground like a field of pillows.
Elders told us he is the larger than life
character, one who changes at the drop
of a cedar cone into anything
his four-shadowed heart desires.
And Trickster does have more sides
than a walrus but never as round
as that ton of blubber or as smelly.
Raven desires nothing but
to shatter or remove our tendency
to stick our head in sand.
And he has no reservations at poking
fun at the timid and lazy, the bigot
and prude, coward and liar,
the ones with guns and thousand-
dollar bills glinting in their eyes.
Yet Raven’s lasting role is to wear
the mask of the night, the critter
roaming in the blood of our nature.
And at your bedside he sings
a lullaby to put under your pillow.

If you close your eyes with a smile
and the rose blossoms on your cheeks,
Sleep Bird will coo for the night
and you’ll wake in a laugh of delight.
He steps through the forest
with the sun and moon as a person
like you, or a fox or yellow lupine.
Trickster surprises by surfacing
from the oldest and deepest burrows
of our ancestor stories.
Raven’s so old he was skipping down
Earth’s trail singing before dinosaurs
turned into streams of oil pools.
Trickster flies through our lives and sparkles
in our eyes with his salmon-in-the-sky
masquerade. Eagle has been jealous
since he broke from his mother’s egg.
Raven cruises through our imagination
and we love it; he’s a survivor from history
and always has a story to tell.
Deep within us, at the spirit’s cave,
he is a real friend and guardian.