The sombrero you wore
said to everyone gathered:
“Look at me!”
and if that wasn’t enough to catch their eye
when you entered the room as a playful old woman
in your bright Mexican hat,
your newly healed legs sliding backwards,
moon-walking in slow motion like you were
part Michael Jackson, part Charlie Chaplin,
told us all that something special was happening.
The old Lakota medicine man,
the one who years ago had
pointed toward Quetzalcoatl
and said, “seek
the Plumed Serpent,”
never noticed his old friend,
now a heyoka,
gliding smoothly backwards
across the floor.
Instead, his attention was on me,
his arm firmly around my shoulder
like a long lost son returned.
His arm would not
relinquish me.
It remained.
We sat on the ground,
the old woman and I,
the two of us facing
the medicine man, his simple
humble presence solid as
a mountain of granite before us.
As she leaned back into me
he said, “That wasn’t easy
last night when she leaned on me
for over an hour.”
"My back is strong,” I offered,
and feeling her weight falling into me
said to her, “You can lean on me,
I will hold you up.”
And I remained.
A heyoka is born
by lightning strike, they say.
I’ve been struck before.
Never saw it coming -
have been walking backwards since.
Now I tempt the gods - daring them
by holding long metal rods
on mountaintops in lightning storms.
How can they make me walk
anymore backwards?
“You wanna piece of this?!
You want this?!
You can have it!”
But they scoff at the idea.
After all, of what use
is a moon-walking, sombrero-wearing
heyoka searching for
the Plumed Serpent?
Still,
I remain.
