man's inhumanity to man: commemorating the american halocausts

Historical grief slips secretly generation into generation

Unseen yet emotionally heard

In sterile familiar poverty;

Pain, sacrifice still poisons unresolved time,

Victims caught in moments of  past tragedy

Leaving a legacy of tears that haunt children presently.

Adults respond by drinking away  impersonal pain 

Leading  to destruction, self imposed this time, again

From  senses becoming incomplete

And, the  land murmurs in despair, as well as in

The very air 

Filters atmosphere, pathos steeped ...

Spirits all around

Some Native to this land, others brought to serve and slave

Still overlapping the sequence

beyond dying, out side the living

Imprints of sorrow nestled in the soil

Discerned by the unconscious living mind

The footprints of historic grief.... 

art: Trail of Tears by Truesdale copyright 1776

Water is Life

Water has a reflective quality

Does it mirror

The sun, moon, stars at night,

Or impersonal technology?

The subtlety of the dawn and evening skies,

Or trite, trivial media banalities?

The complex changing seasons,

Or the diminishing color sensitivities

In the coolness of an increasingly warm world

With less and less diversity?

Just what is realty;

A clean and fragrant mountain stream

Or a frightened and angry society?

copyright 2010

 Water is Life

Protect our Planet

Basket-House-Village-Universe

Reclaiming the Hearth
And Food as Sacred

Basket-House-Village-Universe

by Toni Truesdale

Baskets of women

Reflect nourishment

Physical as well as spiritual

Object to concept

Keeping sacred the spirit of everyday life;

Within the home

Utilitarian to universal

Dwelling to village

Community to cosmos

Each human passage

of the last 140 thousand years...

Birth to death

The finite to consummation

End to beginning...

copyright 2010

ToniTruesdale.com

Sugar

by Toni Truesdale

Celebrate overcoming the past

All People of Color

Is it freedom at last?

We begin each morning

Sweetening our cups of coffee and tea;

With sugar refined as

White as history;

Trying hard to distance itself

From the memory

Of genocide and slavery.

Now In the beautiful, warm vacation seas.

Shanty towns and the company store

Create the stillness of poverty;

The Eden now cleared of Native Peoples

And the terrorized Africans

Overworked and disposed before 30.

All to create fortunes for entitled families.

Money from death and misery, bleached

Pure by virtuous European banks;

In a society where income is so esteemed

It became the western hierarchy of ruling currency.

Celebrate overcoming the past,

Where all people are valued at last.

Celebrate the yet to come;

Where full freedom is finally won.

Dedicated to the very Reverand William Potter

Truesdale copyright 2011

Migrations:Origin Stories

Migrations: Origin Stories 

"Primordial peoples

Set Forth on the longest Journey;

To descend into each individual moment of

Still flowing humanity.

Those first peoples, sowed each continent

Common stories, myth, rites

To celebrate what we have always shared,

Great Mother Earth, the Guardian

Goddess of a thousand names."

copyright T. Truesdale 2016

Embracing Female Fierceness

Our Determined Struggle

Leaping over the barriers of time, space and custom.

Into strengths forged by strife.

Women we are coming.

Unbinding the imagery fed by industry,

We seek to define our own truest selves;

Separating from artificial roles and cultural boundaries;

Women we are coming. 

Grasping our fates that determine the world,

Challenging dictates that conform and oppress,

Controlling the energy that creates life.

Women we are coming.

copyright T.Truesdale 

The Fate of the World

The fate of the world

Is in the hands holding female energy;

That seeks to balance Earth

From the pillage of resources,

Destruction of the environment,

Murder of others…

It is time to come forward,

 Women of all cultures, all ages;

And rejoin all the fibers of the damaged elements

Reweaving the weft and warp of the world

Connecting all, into the future foretold.

ToniTruesdale.com

T.Truesdale copyright 2016