Hava Arden

  Tice’s published articles and poetry are on travel, artists, social issues, the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico and Eskimos of Point Barrow, Alaska.

  During the 60s and early 70s, Tice was a busy and productive social activist. She wrote poems in Spanish for barrio protest marches. An article written in 1957, on a trip through the south with Vivian Ayres Allen and her three children, Debbie Allen, Felicia Rashad and Tex, prompted The Texas Observer to run off 10,000 extra copies on their experiences as they traveled by car through the South at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.

  Her chapbooks are inventoried in her archive at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. In Time to Tango, co-authored by Nichols Sands (Vergin Press, 2002), is the story of a love relationship impacted by post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Her life-long interests include working with people, poetry, psychoanalysis, play and the philosophy and practice of Buddhism.

  An Excerpt from:

Chimerical Mind of a Poet

My childhood experiences were played out in a small rural community in western Oklahoma during the 1930s and 1940s.

Those early years were full of excitement, color, sound and Indians. My grandparents, Belle and John, took me to my first pow-wow when I was four years old. I still recall the Indian drums, and later I remembered, at the big house in Lawton, the red-faced farmers, hawking musically from their horse-drawn wagons. S-t-r-o-m-b-e-r-r-I-e-s, stromberRIES, STROMberries. Always ending the cadence on a short, staccato note.

Standing with my grandparents, looking out from the heights of Medicine Bluff in the Wichita Mountains – where two Indian lovers leapt to their deaths – I almost saw, stretching out and back a hundred miles and forty years ago, the prairie schooner John first traveled into Indian Territory in 1878, parting the waist-high blue-stem hay as it rolled through herds of wild antelope and buffalo.

in the beginning was the land

the land the land the land

slow slow the heavy-footed oxen go

word land how strange you are

  as strange as wind in my fist

but you will be here when I go

slow slow the heavy-footed oxen go

why lie

when to say anything but that they were people

is false

they were mean-mouthed narrow-lipped happy-songed

and kind-to-a-stranger

at first they stole indian ponies to get a string of their own

and rode whipped-free by the wind

made love in the cool cavern of a wikiup

to some lice-licked maid

and if god was not there

sky was

Driving in their old Ford from their granite stone cottage, we would go hunting for pecans at Cache Creek (a place where “things” had been secreted during some scary affair). Once, while on a nutting excursion, John said, sternly kicking the dirt that exposed a buried wagon, “See here, Ardie, this is what’s left of the Warren Wagon Massacre!” Fascinated, I listened as he told me about how Dohate, called Mamanti in 1871, incited Santanta, Yellow Wolf, Big Tree, Satank and Eagle Heart to attack the wagon, leaving five mutilated, scalped bodies in token of their coup.

santanta yellow wolf big tree satank and eagle heart

were the principal chiefs who left five mutilated scalped bodies

in token of their coup

when arrested santanta proudly admitted he had led the raid

was it not his profession to wage war

he was no weak wichita or caddo to cultivate vegetables

in a stone cell at fort will told they would be sent to texas

bitterness filled their hearts

four men killed three others badly wounded

the score was even

but the great white father did not listen

on the day the chiefs were taken from their cells

and placed in the wagons that were to carry them to trial

santanta and big tree were much subdued

not so hollow cheeked satank

with silver hair and downturned mouth

he was of ko-eet-senko and death was better than dishonor

he sang

o sun you remain forever

but we ko-eet-senko must die

the soldiers mocked the old man

singing his deathchant in the sun

but when the song was finished

he grabbed the carbine of his guard

seven or eight men opened fire

and in thirty seconds satank was done

* * * * * *

under a tossed tornado sky

bound mounds of rose madder

burnt sienna in shadow

lorca’s green is incessant

aqueous pistachio emerald mustard

rose pools dot the green chalcedony

making bloodstones in the land

flowers flock in fiery dew

and space their dyes distinctly

I remember my Scottish, pioneer grandmother as firm and dignified, but full of strength and compassion. She was the female figure with whom I identified. I wanted to be strong, independent like her. So often this desire was a reaction formation of my helplessness and came out as harsh, strident:

in the beginning too were the picts

little men painted blue in flying chariots

or hiding brown like a bent branch behind a tree

no cold hunger or pain bowed the heather drinkers

for were they not all things

song sword and stone

burrowing in wet marshes or

marching east to kiss the sun

yell then and tell me too much

not malleable in this civilized state

and i shall say it was ever so

for am i not descendant of the picts

returned from centuries on the green isles

to be again green mounds turned brown

or blue water into spray

and . . .

everywhere we turn

tuned out of

black power

white power

flower power

go power

 

  no power

the last unbelievable

unbelievable

elephants live a long long time

and die

but they can’t be killed

even if they are to big to fit in

(c) 2004 by Arden Tice

(c) 2005 by Arden Tice