I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move

By Louise Erdrich b. 1954 Louise Erdrich

We watched from the house

as the river grew, helpless

and terrible in its unfamiliar body.

Wrestling everything into it,

the water wrapped around trees

until their life-hold was broken.

They went down, one by one,

and the river dragged off their covering.

Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,

snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:

a whole forest pulled through the teeth

of the spillway. Trees surfacing

singly, where the river poured off

into arteries for fields below the reservation.

When at last it was over, the long removal,

they had all become the same dry wood.

We walked among them, the branches

whitening in the raw sun.

Above us drifted herons,

alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,

settling their beaks among the hollows.

Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people

moving among us, unable to take their rest.

Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.

Their long wings are bending the air

into circles through which they fall.

They rise again in shifting wheels.

How long must we live in the broken figures

their necks make, narrowing the sky.

Louise Erdrich, “I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move” from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Source: Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2003)

Biography

Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1954. As the daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, Erdrich explores Native-American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. In an award-winning series of related novels and short stories, Erdrich has visited and re-visited the North Dakota lands where her ancestors met and mingled, representing Chippewa . . .

Continue reading this biography