Arts Alive San Antonio

The poems we are publishing today were inspired by the Apache Pitch Lined Basket, from the Witte Museum Collection.

(Adult Winning Poems (in no particular order)

Skin Thirst (spoken to Apache Pitch Lined Basket)
 by Mobi Warren

Your pine pitch has weathered to a fabric
of scattered ash and mottled mallow rose.
Pomegranate-womb, memory of water.

My hands reach across time to touch the hands
that made you. Palm to ghostly palm, 
sweetgrass-scented hands coarsened
to the task of survival.

Asphalt roads have erased the maker’s tracks
and sealed hidden springs. But here, 
scent of water still pours from your mouth.

Apache Pitch Lined Basket
by Catherine Lee

we women made these pots, they take our shape,
not apparent, what we are made of: 
tight-woven grass gathered during warmer months,
white pine tar oozed when woodpecker-damaged
flesh suit was heated delicately above fire, mixed 
with rabbit dung, fur, charcoal, yielding antiseptic glue 
of ancestral relatives. within our civil circle, 
all must hunt, feed, gather, to reproduce this journey. 
we carry need with weary grip, engage in mothering tasks:
cooking, suckling, a pitch-lined olla holding water, 
bearing generational hips of faint mysterious design.
reduced to modern functionality, displayed, 
observed behind clean glass, decorative, labeled 
basket jar, said to be utilized by mobile, 
fierce defenders, Apache denotes “enemy”

Bloodline
by Karen Summers-Murray

The People are silent and fast and fierce as they move
The women among them carry the baskets and sing
Each woman sings of her tears, the blood, the rain
Her soul, her babe, she changes, grows heavy, then light
She feints, or stalks, or darts through the piñons, she runs
The Ancestors knew, and sending the knowledge ahead
Whispered it through the trees. Their wandering Children
Heard, became silent, and fast, and fierce, and careful
Careful to carry the knowledge within the baskets
Where there it is mixed with tears, with blood, with rain 
With songs of the newly born babe. She will grow, and listen
She builds her own basket and carries it close and yearns
She will carry the People, their needs, their future, her soul
The basket the basket the basket