Riding Beneath Čháŋ Óhaŋ By J. Nider

The Rising Phoenix Review

Dec 19

Riding Beneath Čháŋ Óhaŋ
(Riding Beneath Crazy Horse)

The musk of soap, sweet hay, sweat, and
warm leather rises up through
the cold pre-dawn air from chestnut flanks.
I breathe it in deeply; this
is the scent of wildness, tempered with the
heady perfume of Lakota land
in barest spring:
ash trees coming to bloom, frozen earth
beginning to soften,
air that still scorches the lungs with cold.
We walk at the foot of
the great chieftain's mount,
his half-hewn form merging
with the stallion beneath him.
I can see the side of the mountain
through the white-and-black
painted ash trunks, stone
surging skywards through the Earth, as
though the great stone chief and his
wild-eyed horse are finally
escaping the thawed earth to which
they'd long been resigned. But it's
much too quiet here for such sudden
revolution. Perhaps they've been
slowly, steadily extricating themselves
from that mountainside for the
past seventy one years, so as not to
disturb the patch of peace around them, careful
to leave the world undisturbed in monument
as they had in life. My heart aches
for a world carefully cared for as the
Ogalala land before my father's
pillaging, gunslinging ancestors made
a ruin, a halfhearted monument, a
mockery of the Lakota memory,
cousins of my mother's great-grandmother's people.
As I bob atop my own mount, her hooves making
little noise in the damp path - she too
knows not to break the holy quiet
of sunrise - she turns her head gently
and seems to nod at a doe standing
above her sleepy-eyed daughter. The doe
bats her eyes in understanding and
settles, resting her tawny head beside
her child as hints of warmed sunlight
begin to filter through the leaves. This
is the day I come to understand:
there is a god, and she chooses
to reveal herself shrouded in the
muffled silence of dawn,
in these holiest of spaces,
these whispering remnants
of sacred places waiting
to reclaim themselves.
Silent prayer drips from
my mouth, hoping the gods of old
still listen, still forgive.

By J. Nider

Biography:

J. Nider is a writer-poet, weird-parent, tree-admirer, and likely-hobbit living in Northeastern Kansas on stolen Kansa land. Pieces of her previously published work can be found in Ink and Marrow Press, The America Library of Poetry, and Abyss and Apex Magazine. You can find her attempting to write, bake, meditate, overthrow the powers that be, and chase two kids (often many of these at the same time). Please don't find her on social media - she's, frankly, kind of bad at it.