Sáanii Dahataal/The Women Are Singing: Poems and Stories Book

Luci Tapahonso is a wonderful storyteller. Her poems and prose were in this collection were a delightful, intriguing and moving read. I fell in love with her visual and vivid imagery as in this excerpt from Blue Horses Rush In.

"Before the birth, she moved and pushed inside her mother. Her heart pounded quickly and we recognized the sound of horses running:
the thundering of hooves on the desert floor...
She arrived amid a herd of horses,
horses of different colors..."

Booklist writes, "...Tapahono provides us with a true bridge to her culture and its spiritual insights" and so it is. I walked with her, I drove with her, I felt the struggle and joys of a mother alone with her children. I felt her losses and heartaches. I reveled in the poignant wisdom of her stories. In "Just Past Shiprock" she writes of a wise older cousin who while on a road trip, piled in the back of a pickup truck told a story that stuck with them and sticks with me. She pointed to a rock and told how a couple with a very sick young baby traveling through, had finally laid their daughter to rest, there. She said, "So that's why when we come through here, remember those rocks and the baby who was buried there...Think about her and be quiet. Those rocks might look like any others, but they're special." This was really meaningful because not long after reading the book I was traveling from Bisbee toward Tombstone, and there was all this chatter and banter in the car and I looked out and saw Tombstone in the distance and thought wow, can we just look out here and be still and imagine what it was like for all those people long ago to travel this on horseback or on foot even. So much we slip by, so much we take for granted. This ease of traveling in a car, so that this car becomes our universe. And we are disconnected from the scenery around us. When that is supposedly why we took the trip in the first place. To see these historic places. For me, that has of late become less about seeing and more about feeling. I daresay, words like Luci Tapahonso's have helped cultivate that in me.