CENTO FOR SHARED SPACE:
The Mounds at Our Feet

Our wealth abounds / within what we preserve. (a)

Between the amnesia from above and the memory of below, (b)

I lay my bones down / upon the earth… (c)

Now, I am pulled / By the moon, (d)

The land is a poem of ochre and burnt sand I could never write… (e)

The ancestor in me urges me to pray. (f)

She is a hundred kinds of rain, a hundred kinds of storms, a hundred kinds of radiant horses. (g)

In two old excavations, water stood and the wild iris grew. (h)

Bottoms of trees / bear a responsibility to something/ besides people… (i)

Somehow we find our way back. (j)

My energy enters the earth / Sustaining all that lives, (k)

A place is a sound, and a way of hearing it.
A web of interrelationships, an exchange between people and earth. / The space of naming. (l)

We are approaching a great, common tenderness. (m)

Decorating the dead is among the most basic human instincts, to return the borrowed body &
acknowledge Earth as maker & home. (n)

Today, we stood at the edge of all this
And looked out at so much water, the mountains we crossed
To get here seem a little smaller. (o)

Touch the earth lightly, but leave / Your marks so caring eyes can see them. (p)

I stand my ground and wait, / Ready to hold on for dear life. (q)

The rest of this must be said in silence
because of the enormous difference between light
and words that say light. (r)

Made from the words of Allison Hedge Coke (a), Subcomandante Marcos (b), Maria Blackhorse (c), Michael Rothenberg (d), Joy Harjo (e), Simon Ortiz (f), Tiffany Midge (g), Martha Bergland (h), Lucile Clifton (i), Louise Erdrich (j), the Bhagavad-Gita (k), Cecilia Vicuña (l), Pablo Neruda (m), Nate Marshall (n), Frank X. Walker (o), Estella Lauter (p), Denise Sweet (q), Rumi (r)