Venaya Yazzie – Poetry

Coyote remembers II

.at dawn

coyote
licks his turquoise
paw. and above
morning star
monitor billows blue air breathes
in and out –

.at dawn

coyote
his tail touching
gleaming
alkaline
layers sitting upon his black pupils. Outside: orange corona haloes the tips of cornstalk rows.

Glittering particles drifted west toward the rio grande
and the chatter of spring flow at canyon de chelly. Speaking black and white rainbows into the air. he coughed

ancestors speaking in arid desert tongues.

Translation:
old stories

Venaya Yazzie is from the San Juan Valley in northwestern New Mexico, she is of Diné (Navajo) and Hopi affiliations and a member of the Eastern Navajo reservation. Venaya as an artists and educator strives to reclaim the Indigenous stories of her desert people via her art, poetry and photography. She has worked to document the oral histories of the Navajo elders of Eastern Navajo in the community of Huerfano,  NM. Yazzie graduated from the University of New Mexico with an M.A. in Education and minor in Indian Education, she is also an alumnus of Fort Lewis College, in Durango, Colorado and the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  She is a member of the Northwest New Mexico Arts Council and has been an Artist-In-Residence of the Bisti Writing Project.

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