Poesia delle Indiane d'America.(14)

Hopi reservation

Miwok reservation

Wendy Rose[1].14

                                                             

Rose uses epic imagery, and references to the past in most of her work. She is

renowned for expressing the real world with an exciting imaginary twist. In her

poem “Alien Seeds”, she speaks about the growing of plants in California, and

how Natives of the past respected the land.

“How is it that I did not know the gold hillside near my house

is as foreign to the land as any intruder, as the straight boards

and liquid rock poured onto the land where my house stands?

All these, wild oats, the strangling grass, even the succulents

with the secret of moisture within, the tumbleweed

rode on the tails of strange beasts or were caught

in the wool of Spanish sheep. How can I not feel

the killing, the massacre that cleard the valley, the foothills,

the mountains of my kind? For every seed, its wagon train;

rhizomes colonize underground, spines catch foxes

on their little hooks--barbed wire crosses our nations

and taproots suck the stolen dew

no matter how dry the desert.”*

Thistles

* Immagine di poema epico di usi di Rose,e referenze al passato nella maggior parte del suo lavoro. Lei è nota  per esprimere il vero mondo con una torsione immaginaria ed eccitante .Cfr. il suo poema “Semi Alieni” 

[1] 1948.nata a Oakland,da padre Hopi e da madre Miwok,molto attiva in varie organizzazioni indiane che operano in ambito politico e sociale,con un Ph. D. in antropologia,ed è stata docente di american Indian Studies a Berkeley,presso l’Università della California e presso il California State College a Fresno,dove vive..Numerose le sue pubblicazioni di poesie,alcune delle quali comprendono anche i suoi acquerelli.

Territorio Miwok,Sacramento,California.

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