The Storyteller

The Storyteller

by Toni Truesdale

Morality tales in retrospection

Sing the world into creation, again;

Reenacting the cumulative wisdom

Cultural knowledge retains,

In prose that teaches;

Rules, mores and responsibilities

Concerning complex relationships

Of original instructions.

In commonality within communities,

The oral traditions reflect;

Collective memory in the timeless narratives

Of the Storyteller.

Copyright 2010

The Black Madonna

“The Madonna”

by Toni Truesdale

The beautiful dark Madonna comes down to us

from the our beginnings.

She has many names: Ana, Tiamat, Isis, Cybele,

Demeter, Sheba, Mary Magdalene,

Mary, mother of Christ,

Maya,  mother of Buddha,

Fatima’ daughter of Mohammed,

Nana Bakula, Spider Woman, First Woman,

Parvati, Oxum, Corn Maiden, Eurzuli,

Oya, Morrigan, Ishtar,Tara, Gaia, Saule, Amaterasu,

Coatlicue, Nerthus...

She is of the earth and the sky;

She is our mother and our mother’s mother, and so on

to the very first spark of life,

She is always,The Great Mother.

She is us. We are she.

Copyright 1976

Toni Truesdale.com

Time for all Women to Join Hands and Establish a New Paradigm

“The Grandmothers”

by Toni Truesdale

It is the time for the latent

Power of women to return.

The Spirits reach out to the earth

And all inhabitants.

It is a time of transition;

The view of one dominant

Culture is to be transformed

Into the perspective of many;

As thoughts of war turn

Into negotiations of peace,

Eliminating injustice, domination and discrimination.

The ancestors have told us,

Women elders speak with the strength

Of generations.

Copyright 2008 T. Truesdale

TONITRUESDALE.com

Let us remember our american halocaust, the true history of land theft

“Wounded Knee”

By Toni Truesdale

Just after Christmas, 1890, a group of Minneconjou Sioux

camped close to Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

They were led by Big Foot, who was very ill with pneumonia.

The tribe had just come through the Badlands with great difficulty.

It was frigid. The very air froze on the breath of the people.

Big Foot traveled in a wagon with a white flag.

He had hoped to join Red Cloud at Pine Ridge

to protect his people from the U.S. Calvary.

Major Whitside caught up with him on December 28.

He took the small band to camp at a creek called Wounded Knee.

The morning of the 29th, Colonial Forsyth, from Custer’s old regiment,

Proceeded to harass the Minneconjou men while looking for weapons.

A Young Man, Black Coyote, was trying to put his hunting rifle down.

The soldiers grabbed him and roughed him up.

Suddenly, there was a sound like a gunshot.

No one is really sure if it was a gun or who fired it. The soldiers didn’t investigate,

They opened fire instead.

The Minneconjou had been disarmed, they had only a few knives and clubs.

There was a brief struggle.

Then all the Minneconjou started to run from the big Hotchkiss guns

stationed on the hill above aiming at all the women and children.

It didn’t take long to kill nearly three hundred of the Sioux band.

Only a few soldiers died; mostly by friendly fire in the killing frenzy.

The people were buried in a huge mass grave, dug into the frozen ground.

Together in a mass grave, their bodies were contorted in the agony of violent death.

Big Foot’s band still remain at Wounded Knee

to testify silently on the depopulation techniques of the U.S. Government.

The Mass murder was legal,

The soldiers awarded the “Medal of Honor”.

Save Our Sacred Spaces

Bears Ears

Whispers of juniper,

Sage scent of star filled nights;

Wind whispering softly of

Remembered rites on plazas

Dancing to the drum, song, prayers

That echo still.

Handholds furrowed into cliff sides

Painted in prehistoric colors.

Footsteps of the ancients follow

Lightly dusted trade roads

Between carefully placed stones of origins.

Bears Ears: Birthplace of living nations.

Toni Truesdale

Copyright 2017

Tonitruesdale.com

Turning Point: Action Required

Turning Point: Action Required

Ground waters run toxic

Poisonous chemicals color rivers and streams;

Ocean dead zones expand

As sea creatures struggle with our plastic waste.

Our lands are being stripped and broken;

In pursuit of fossil fuels that belch out greenhouse gasses.

Expanding housing and gleaning,

Strip the forests, farms and age-old civilizations.

The impoverished perish with

Spreading disease, desertification and rising vector lines;

The swelling of waters swamp fragile sea coats.

Chemicals, petroleum and nuclear accidents endanger entire ecosystems,

Extinctions accelerate.

Yet we continue to prevail destruction upon the sacred earth.

Land, sea, waters, air once pristine not long ago

Are wastelands expanding daily

To suffocate all life on Earth.

Warned by the Indigenous peoples of the world.

We wonder now with the knowledge of the perceptions foretold.

But who among us will stand?

There is only one world,

Every culture on earth has a sacred name for her.

Where humans migrated,

A word expressed love, sustenance, thanks

To the great, common Mother.

May we remember them now.

Toni Truesdale 2017

Earth Mother copyright 2001

Feathers: Embracing Prophesy

Embracing Prophesy

The feathers drift in the breeze

To be in symbiotic symmetry

With powerful shamans

Who pray beyond their experience,

To encompass the whole of existence.

The gift of the birds;

Who die unnaturally;

Linked to events foretold

By the ancient mnemonics

Of the Hopi and sacred medicine people all over the world

Who listen to feathers,

And hear the silence of frogs everywhere.

Handsome Lake did foresee

The trees that now die from the top down

Happening now…

The ground is parched where small animals lived in Africa

And here, in this present…

Water swells with melting global tips.

Canaries in the mines

Are empty nests.

Fire fierce lurks beneath and above,

Disrupting fragile things that grow

And push into the sea, man-made things.

The earth rumbles underneath our very feet

Emptying villages.

The old ones grow closer

Whispering into the four winds;

They sing over battlegrounds,

Graveyards, centuries old.

Where erections now glitter with windows

Looking out at unhearing thousands

Going here, there, everywhere

Directed by a technology of weapons

Wanting, taking, demanding, demonstrating

How to be a correct human.

But their song falls into our steps

Winding around our footfalls

Just above the sacred earth;

Sanctified, so many years ago.

Prophesy is never forgotten

It lingers in stones

Waiting to be picked up and held.

 "Embracing Prophesy" Truesdale  1998/updated 2017

"Feathers" by Truesdale copyright 1995

Toni Truesdale.com