Where is Peace?

Where is this place of peace you speak of?

Is it in the government cabins

Littering the reservation

Where the stamps provide for all,

And no one tempts or wants too much?

Is it in the tepee’d village,

Smoke swirling up thru tops of wigwams,

Before the customs infringed with fear,

Before colors banded to show whose tribe

Was superior?

Or do I have to travel back

To even a more distant time,

Before the language,

Before the bonds of any lack, or any grace,

Shed their false ideas and notions,

Obligating, strapping humanity,

Hunching its shoulders and bowing its head in shame,

To an epoch before the dna changed?

I want this peace of the golden age.

Should I look forward or back for it?

I want it to be here and now.

But when I hear it spoken of,

I wonder.

-jenn long