How carefully she taught us

To draw a spider web,

Our first grade teacher

Who had come from being a missionary 

At a Navajo reservation.

Normally every lesson seemed

Of the same importance,

But on this bright October morn,

She stopped and stood before the room,

And was so still and silent

That a class full of thirty six year-olds

Quieted, and wondered now

If something were wrong.

But she told us to take out our rulers

And our blackest pencils,

And while she took a yardstick out

And a white piece of chalk,

And drew on the blackboard,

She spoke to us.

She taught us how to make a cross,

And how this represent the cardinal directions

Of north, south, east, and west,

And then she drew an X imposed,

And told us all the ordinals:

Northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest.

More lines geometrically between,

She called the “secondary intercardinals.”

And while we were mesmerized 

By our Spirographing, she told us

A Hopi creation story, of how Great Uncle

Had created The Spiderwoman,

And how she created the world.

And as we drew our lines,

We pondered how the strings of a spiderweb all move,

If even only one of them is touched.

She told us that all the people out there

In every cardinal direction, and every ordinal direction,

And at every secondary intercardinal point

Were related to us, and connected.

And so we drew our spiderwebs,

So deep in thought,

Knowing, as only six year olds can,

That it made a lot of sense,

Maybe even more than other stories we had heard.

-jenn