considering “Tent Metaphor (Standing Rock” by Yatika Starr Fields
Black snake moving, slithering through the plains. Disgorging its slick noir underbelly to those with cash-money-capital-funds, to those who want because they do not have, lack the culture to gird them from the cold.
Black snake undercutting all that was, insisting on its hierarchical right, hubris and ignorance mixed in its bile, flowing neither north or south but belly-up, swollen and stagnant on stolen lands, waiting to suck up the earth’s blood and move it away.
Sleeping in tents on the land the bodies of the water protectors: artists, peace doulas, sage scented grandmothers, drug infused mendicants, stoic preachers, awakened students, shrewd vets.
Shoulder to shoulder. Boiling water in the murky dawn to share tea, break stale bread. They fold their bedclothes before the ritual of the cold push against federal officers who prod with batons, blare with megaphones, and insist on their removal.
Removed. Hounded. Stolen. Deceived. Pushed, again, back-away-off.
Not this time.
The artist employs tools of joyful resistance:
Hand-drawn letters declaring NoDAPL, imperfection their calling card of authenticity.
Reclaimed tarps of Patagonia, North Face, REI, torn, cut, and resewn. This, too is ours.
Colors representing nations, telling stories to those who understand their language. Insisting on the DL.
Gold and silver echo the medical blankets wrapped around refugees’ shoulders, displaced, cold, and lost, but are really sparkling trinkets for the crows, reminders of the gods’ endless presence.
Black snake, I’m sorry you pulled this short stick and had to be the emblem of so much anger. No doubt you are someone’s lover, someone else’s memento mori. You strike fear but your scales are patterned with such intricate beauty, the earth below makes way for your gliding sway.
Fangs sink into the thin skin of those who don’t understand you, whose vicious fear of this world is greater than their humble love for it.
The tent people, the water protectors, the grandmothers and vets who scrabbled together on the frozen South Dakota encampment know your beautiful skin will loosen itself and that after you attack the fat hands you can remove yourself and begin again.
