LANCE HENSON, CHEYENNE POET – POEMS

He is Cheyenne, Oglala and French. He served in the U. S. Marine Corps after high school, during the Vietnam War, and is a graduate of Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts in Chickasha. He was born in Washington, D. C. in 1944. He was raised on a farm near Calumet, Oklahoma by his great aunt and uncle, Bertha and Bob Cook. Lance Henson was the last of five boys raised by this couple. He grew up living the Southern Cheyenne culture. He has published 28 volumes of poetry, which have been translated into 25 languages. He has been described as the foremost Cheyenne poet now writing. After ten years of conducting poetry workshops, Lance began to travel, working both in the U.S. and in Europe. He has participated in Cheyenne Sun Dance on several occasions as both dancer and painter. Henson’s poems draw upon his Cheyenne heritage, incorporating words from the Cheyenne language, Cheyenne philosophy.

ANCESTRALS – There are days born so far away from each other, words too sorrowful to know they are words, all their meanings coming back without them. The old memory washing up in the bells of midnight, I search for you, sitting by the kerosene lamp over forty years now, I have not lost you, I have lost myself, for bertha cook. Smoke curls out of the window, a gauzed prayer wrapped in the sound of the wind, here are the things that do not need us, in shadows beside us. Silent rivers full of broken mirrors and faces arriving from the wars. It is already yesterday, moving among the lamps. A dream of a tattered red cloth falling to earth, but whose dream.All the sorrowed voices falling away at the edge of the world, at the edge of everything. To move in open country, to sit in a clear place, to guard life, dog soldier prayer cheyenne.

FIVE DREAMS – New moon on a still winter lake, blood on a leaf in Uganda, snowfall how long before we arrive, sliver of light on a coffin in Chiapas, who will hear our voices.

HERE IN A GATHERING RAIN – Here in a gathering rain are the ones chained to fear, even their faces have left them, so they look like everyone. One cannot write terror in a word, it can only be seen in a face, in a mexican bar a man in a dirty white suit, said these things as he sat in front of a glass of whiskey, into which his life had fallen. I awoke to a red hotel light, blinking through the window, and pulsing on the ash tray, beside the bed, your fingerprints in moth down, among the bottles and cigar ashes, wind whistling through the mirror.

https://www.amazon.com/Naming-Dark-Cheyenne-Lance-Henson/dp/B002CMYTYC