Part 3

_They gather at the mud-walled church, A crew of motlied folk, In gala dress their saint to bless, In striped and fringéd cloak...._ ]

SAINT DOMINIC’S DAY

_August 4, Pueblo of Santo Domingo_

A blessed Saint is Dominic And blessed folk are they, In many a land, ’neath many a sun, Who keep his holy day---- Who gift of waxen tapers bring And kneel them down to pray:

Who kneel before his image bright With golden-bearded face And gilded robe and coronet And beg of him a grace---- Where they keep the dear Saint’s festival In many an outland place.

’Tis in the time of the tasseled maize When the fields are plumed with green And the mesas of the terraced land Red-wall them in between, While overhead the cloud-flecked sky Is lazily serene,---- ’Tis in this time men dance the corn That the harvest be not lean.

They gather at the mud-walled church, A crew of motlied folk, In gala dress their Saint to bless, In striped and fringéd cloak, In beaded shirt and blanket gay, Answering the bellman’s stroke:

They heed them well the chiméd bell, They go within to pray Where golden-bearded Dominic In festival array---- The blessed Saint in festal paint---- Smiles pleasantly that day:

He smiles upon each worshipper Who enters at the door And makes the sign of Christian faith From the bowl that stands before---- The bowl with olden pagan things Obscurely patterned o’er,----

Who kneels before the sanguined rail, The Virgin in her blue, The Christ upon his painted Cross,---- And nigh them, bright of hue, A pony and a buffalo Some dark-skinned artist drew, With cock and stag and butterfly, And maize just as it grew

All greened and bannered in the fields Long ages ere the day The foreign priest had brought the feast Of Dominic that way---- The long-robed priest had taught the feast And taught the words to say When in the time of tasseled maize For plenty men must pray:

And so they gather at the church, As now for many a year, Within its old adobe walls Holy mass to hear While they kneel where dear Saint Dominic Sits smiling pleasant cheer,---- For corn will grow as all men know If Dominic be near.

With beating drum and rattling shell, With gunshot and with shout, Beneath a flaunting canopy They bring the bright Saint out,---- The priest with gold-rimmed spectacles, The friar gowned and stout, The squaw, the chief, the blanket-man,---- Color a-flame in the motlied clan,---- The lanky long-haired scout Nigh a bronzen, earringed Navaho Lingering thereabout.

They march them down the earthen street,---- Each house must Dominic grace; They chant a hymn in the Latin tongue Which Old World centuries have sung; They come to the village place, Where in his shrine made blanket-gay, They set the Saint to face The motlied throng that march with song Into the sunny space---- White, golden-bearded Dominic Sainting a dark-skin race.

Oh, skies are blue where all day through The painted dancers come With plumes a-flare in their dusky hair, With rattle and with drum---- In bright array with bannered display, All timed to the rhythmic drum!

Oh, earth is fair in the sunny air, With her fields of flowing green, Where the mesas of the terraced land Red-wall them in between---- And the folk are gay as they dance the day That the harvest be not lean!

With naked bodies striped and daubed, With flaming parrot crest, Bright necklaces, and terraced crowns Adorned with floating featherdowns---- Earth with the sunlight blest! And ghostly white Koshare clowns, Like souls that know no rest---- Like living souls with ancient things Uncannily possessed!

To rattle and drum the dancers come, The dust-brown earth they beat, While the singers intone an heathen drone Where they follow with rhythmic feet---- An heathen drone which their sires had known Would make the harvest sweet!

They come before Saint Dominic, They dance the growing maize, Its planting and its tasseling, Full-bladed summer days, And the dews and rains that fill the grains, And the purple harvest haze---- The life that lies in Mother Earth And in bright Sun-Father’s rays:

Dancing they sing the antique song That made the maize to grow Or ever Christian priest or saint Their sires had come to know---- Dancing they sing an heathen thing Out of the long ago---- That brought fair yield to the tilléd field Dim centuries ago.

Yes, a blessed Saint is Dominic And blessed folk are they Who come with dancing feet to meet Upon his holy day---- Who tapers bring and old songs sing And reverently pray

Kneeling before his image bright With its golden-bearded face, As the priests had taught when first they brought Their Saint to the dark-skin race,---- Who should keep each year his festival In their ancient dancing-place.

[Illustration: Saint Dominic’s Day--II

_They kneel before the sanguined rail, The Virgin in her blue, The Christ upon his painted cross,-- And nigh them, bright of hue, A pony and a buffalo Some dark-skinned artist drew._ ]

[Illustration: Flower Alone

_They mocked her for her outland ways, They jeered her kin and clan._ ]

FLOWER ALONE

A Santa Clara woman In Sant’ Domingo town, Her rights were less than human That day at red sundown,---- They made her less than dogs are made Within the stranger town.

Oh, she was wicked merry On Santa Clara street! Red-brown as a berry, Hale as ripened wheat; And he who came to woo her, He came on dancing feet.

Round his raven locks a kerchief gay, His belt of the silver wrought,---- From Sant’ Domingo all the way With none but her in thought: A braided scarf, a turquoise ring, These were the gifts he brought.

Why should she heed the old wives’ saw? “A bride should seek her bed “Within the pale of the village law “Wherein she hath been bred.” At old wives’ tales and old wives’ wails She shook a saucy head.

And so in Sant’ Domingo town She ground her daily corn; She drew her water at the well, And there her babe was born; And earthen pots she made to sell And quaintly did adorn.

A Santa Clara woman Within a stranger town, Its folk were more than human To hold her as their own: A saucy-head she had been bred, Should they not bring her down?

They mocked her for her outland ways, They jeered her kin and clan; They whispered evil of her days, They won away her man,---- A saucy-head she had been bred, But, oh, her heart grew wan!

They babbled evil of her days And evil of her art; They mocked, they jeered, they came to gaze Where she bode with aching heart,---- Where moody-eyed in her alien pride With her babe she sat apart.

A Santa Clara woman In Sant’ Domingo town, They made her less than human, And the hour was red sundown When from cut and gash of the plaited lash Crimson her blood ran down.

Crimson her blood as the setting sun, But never to blow or curse Did she open her lips till their work was done And they left her for better or worse,---- Till they dragged her tied to a horse’s tail And left her for a corse.

She lay beside the beasts’ corral, Her body as the dead, And dimly she heard the tiny call Of her babe that would be fed,---- Dimly she heard, and she did crawl To nurse it, while she bled.

A Santa Clara woman Within a stranger town; Her rights were less than human When redly the sun went down,---- But the babe that was born of her body She nursed while the blood ran down.

With curious eyes I watched her at work Where she plied her potter’s art And creatures drew with cunning hand, Bright for the white man’s mart,---- I wondered at the blood-red band Limned to each crimsoned heart.

[Illustration: The Pottery Peddler

_His step was soundless and he seemed A phantom in the land._ ]

THE POTTERY PEDDLER

I saw him with his pack of wares, Spoil of an ancient craft,---- His body supple as the bow After the true-sped shaft:

I liked the weave of banded wool That girt him at the thighs; I liked the glint of gaudy things That filled me with surmise:

The abalone at his ears, His beaded turquoise string; The kerchief round his glossy hair---- Red on a blackbird’s wing:

I liked the silver where its hue Shone on his earth-brown skin, And, oh, his patient eyes I liked, All smouldering within.

I saw him loping up the road Made by the white man’s hand: His step was soundless, and he seemed A phantom in the land.

I saw him on a white man’s street---- And, lo, the street was gone A century of centuries While still mine eyes looked on!

And I beheld him, lithe and proud, Chief upon plain and hill,---- The eagle was his panoply, The mountain lion his kill:

About him thronged his earth-brown kin, Rhythmic with the drum,---- I saw their gleaming feathers And their bright musicians come:

I saw them with their patterned robes, Their glint of gaudy things, Their greens, their reds, their silver whites, Their dangles and their rings:

A century of centuries While still mine eyes looked on: An Indian--and the white man’s street Ten thousand years agone!

[Illustration: The Dead Pueblo--I

_But yesterday its people passed Into their silence and their night, Leaving their broken walls to glow Encrimsoned by the shafted light._ ]

THE DEAD PUEBLO

In 1838 the dozen or so of Indians, who comprised at that time the fading population of Pecos, abandoned their ancient pueblo and took refuge with their kinfolk of Jemez from the unceasing Comanche raids, which for more than a century had been diminishing the tribe. This closed a period of continuous occupation estimated by archaeologists at more than fifteen hundred years, during which the pueblo had become the most powerful in the Rio Grande region. A veritable fortress on its final site,--for it had been removed to the mesa top from an earlier location across the arroyo,--it is believed that Pecos had been founded as a result of the growing attacks of the wild tribes of the Plains and Desert upon the scattered farming communities of the fertile valleys and uplands of the vicinity. For many centuries and through many shifts of the local culture (by no means primitive when Pecos was founded) the community grew in strength--an eastern outpost of the Pueblo civilization. When in 1540 Coronado entered New Mexico in quest of the “seven cities of Cibola,” the people of Cicuyé (a Tewa name by which Pecos became known to the Spaniards) sent a delegation with presents, offering their friendship. Hernando de Alvarado was despatched to the town, where, says the chronicler Castañeda, “the people came out with signs of joy, and brought them into the town with drums and pipes and something like flutes, of which they had a great many; they made many presents of cloth and turquoises, of which there are quantities in that region; and the Spaniards enjoyed themselves for several days.” Of the village Castañeda says: “The houses are all alike, four stories high. One can go over the top of the whole village without there being a street to hinder. There are corridors going all around it at the first two stories, by which one can go around the whole village.... The people of this village boast that no one has been able to conquer them and that they can conquer whatever villages they wish.” It was at Pecos that the Spaniards found the Plains Indian “El Turco,” who told of the wonderful Quivera and lured them on into the expedition toward the Missouri River. When finally Coronado returned to Mexico, Friar Luis, a lay brother, remained at Pecos, one of the two first missionaries of the region. Castañeda writes: “Nothing more has been heard about him; but before the army left Tiguex some men who went to take him a number of sheep met him as he was on his way to visit some other villages.... He felt very hopeful that he was liked at the village [Pecos] and that his teaching would bear fruit, although he complained that the old men were falling away from him. I, for my part, believe that they finally killed him.” Later the Franciscans built at Pecos one of their largest establishments, now a massive ruin.

THE DEAD PUEBLO

I

A valley with its ancient hills Deep-founded in earth’s adamant And crested dark with driven cloud, Like warrior’s trophies blown aslant:

With zenith-high a riven space, Whence royal from his azured zones The golden sun strikes sheer where lie The dead pueblo’s fallen stones:

A ruin upon the mesa top Above the scarred arroyo’s sands, Its ochres crimsoned by the glow, Mid rock-strewn solitudes it stands:

Where citadelled as now with light Its ramparts stood a thousand years, The valley’s strong Acropolis Against the gathering murk of fears:

When Caesars held imperial sway Its dusky warriors manned their wall; Round council-fires its chieftains sate When Roland fell at Roncevalles:

What time the looms of Flanders wove, Its women spun their fleecy thread; They fashioned earthen burial jars While wailing mere mourned Arthur dead:

The dancers gathered to its feasts The while Columbus sailed the seas; At Coronado curious gazed Its children from their mothers’ knees:

And there where now is grass-grown nave, Walls summer-breached and winter-rent, To pray before a Christian saint Came many a dark-hued penitent:

But yesterday its people passed Into their silence and their night, Leaving their broken walls to glow Encrimsoned by the shafted light:

Leaving their valley’s purpled hills To gather glamours and to brood, Scornful of man and his phantom years, In vast and patient solitude.

II

In the days of the Sires of the People Came the First-remembered of Men Forth from the wombs of mothering Night, To seek their Sign and to find their Light, And to hew them homes mid the virgin loams, Then, as ever again.

Out of the mists of the past they marched, Children of Earth and of Sky,---- The red-soil land was theirs to claim, The hill-born torrent their flood to tame, And avalanche-thrown was the quarry-stone For their houses builded high.

They gathered them where the valleys smiled, They gathered them, tribe and clan,---- They laid their walls through the sunny days; They broke their fields and they tilled their maize, And they sang them airs and chanted them prayers That come with the joy of man.

Till up from the glowing desert, And up from the wandering plain, The greased and painted warriors crept With sudden whoop on them that slept---- Like wolves in bands from the famished lands,---- And they left a bloody stain.

They ravaged the peaceful farmsteads, They shattered and scattered the folk, And they filled the land with a deathly spell, Where Apache stealth and Comanche yell And the treacherous blow of the Navaho Their nightly terrors woke.

Till the chieftains counselled in sorrow Mid the sound of women’s woe, And they swore to build them a fortress-keep, And to hold their lands, and to sow and reap Where Sacred Earth had given them birth, Whatso might be their foe!

And they set the rocks of their citadel On the mesa’s granite crest, And their terraces rose till the barren space Became a nation’s gathering place, And the red light shone from the stubborn stone Where the People dwelt at rest.

And a new Age dawned and their troubled Morn Passed into the splendid Day; And they sang from their roofs when their work was done High-chanted hymns to the Fathering Sun; And their bows were strong and the arrow’s prong Kept the carrion tribes at bay.

[Illustration: The Dead Pueblo--II

_With their cornfields and their beanfields, With their vines of squash and pumpkin, With their sunflowers and tobacco, Dwelt the olden folk of Pecos._ ]

III

Time was kindly with this people In the ancient Vale of Pecos, In their citadel enseated High above the scarred arroyo, High upon the brunting mesa.

There within the storeyed houses Built about their dancing plaza, Walled against the foeman’s onslaught, Walled and towered and ever watchful, Safe and happy dwelt the people:

With their cornfields round about them In the pleasant watered valleys, Fair with corn of many colors Sacred to the Guardian Mothers---- White of Morn and blue of Zenith, Yellow for the burning Sunset, Speckled for the cloudy Northland: Earth and Sky have many colors, So the corn has colors many Sacred to the Guardian Mothers:

With their cornfields and their beanfields, With their vines of squash and pumpkin, With their sunflowers and tobacco, Dwelt the olden folk of Pecos Rich and happy in their valley:

And the fires upon their hearth-stones Glowed at dawn and glowed at twilight, And the wavering smoke ascended Quiet into quiet heavens---- Till the city seemed reflected In the vaporous blue of noonday, In the gleaming stars of night-time:

And the women at their grinding Sang the Song of Fruitful Pollen; And the maidens at their spinning Sang the Breath-song of the Cotton; And they wove their baskets singing, Singing modelled earthen vessels, Painted brown and black and yellow With the symbols of the Cloud-Folk, Of the Mist-Folk and the Rain-Folk, And the sudden zig-zag Lightning---- And they left the life-line broken For the spirit of the vessel That it might not be imprisoned In the moulded clay forever:

And the menfolk in the cornfields Sang the Song of Winter Breaking, Sang the Springtime and the Seeding, Sang the Tasseling and Summer, Sang the Fruitfulness of Harvest, And the Life that stirs in all things:

And within their sacred Kivas, Where the Priests and Elders gathered Round their Totems and their Altars, Underneath the painted symbol Of the Plumed and Crested Serpent, There they sang their Spirit Ancients And the deeds of mighty Heroes, Of the Brothers armed with sunbeams Where they slew the hateful monsters When the Primal People wandered And the World was in its making:

And within the sacred Kivas Said the prayers their sires had taught them, That the tribe might live forever Fathered by the Shining Heaven, Mothered on Earth’s fruitful bosom, With the Winds forever breathing Fourfold Life from out the Quarters Of the fourfold World man dwells in:

And the men and women gathered, And the young men and the maidens, And the children and the strangers, When above the Kivas flaunted Banners brilliant with bright feathers Telling of the coming feast-day With the dancing and the chanting And the altars set with prayer-plumes, Where the grave-faced Priests and Elders Smoked before the sacred emblems Of the Powers that watched the nation:

In the ancient Vale of Pecos, In its days of peace and plenty, When the people lived securely In their citadel enseated High above the scarred arroyo, High upon their granite mesa.

[Illustration: The Dead Pueblo--III

_And within their sacred Kivas, Where the Priests and chieftains gathered, Painted with the Serpent Symbol, With their totems and their altars, Sang the days of Spirit Ancients._ ]

[Illustration: The Dead Pueblo--IV

_The Cross of Christus crucified, With thorn-pressed brow and piercéd side, And body wounded sore._ ]

IV

Blessed is the martyr’s crown And valiant were they who wore In Francis’ name the corded gown And to the heathen bore The Cross of Christus crucified, With thorn-pressed brow and piercéd side And body wounded sore:

Like valiant soldiers they did come To preach their Gospel mild And find them sweetest martyrdom Within an heathen wild---- St. Francis’ men, who turned to kiss The Crucifix, and met their bliss, And on their murderers smiled.

Bruit had come to the Pecos folk Of warrior-men from Heaven, Who strid strange beasts and in thunders spoke And armed them with red levin---- Who bannered their hosts with new gods and dread And shook the land with a terrible tread Where they searched for the Cities Seven:

And the Priests and the Elders wafted high The smoke of their questioning prayer, And they asked of Earth and they asked of the Sky And they asked of the Lords of the Air---- And the signs breathed peace, and they were content, And unto the strangers their captains they sent With gifts and with covenants fair.

For why should they fear the stranger’s face When the Powers whom their sires had known Had boded them well from the Sacred Place With its ancient divining stone? Why should men fear who through perilous past By their strong gods warded were mighty at last Into a nation grown?

So with flute and with drum and with gala cheer Forth they thronged them to greet The steeled and glittering Cavalier And the Friar with way-worn feet---- And the men of Spain found pleasant rest, And the ovens glowed, and each grateful guest Warm-scented the odors sweet:

Oh, the men of Spain in Pecos town Were welcomed with joyous array, Whose folk little dreamed as the dusk closed down That their Sun had ended that day---- That an Age of the Red Man’s World was past, And down from their altars his gods were cast To silently vanish away!

Oh, who could the bitterness and the blood Of their lurid morrow know? Where the aged shaman sat grim with his brood Of the Spirits of long ago, And the lonely friar with his lifted sign Stood watching the riders in drifting line Pass out to the morning glow:

And who should rue his martyr’s crown To the valiant soul who wore In Francis’ name the corded gown And to the heathen bore The Cross of Christus crucified, With thorn-pressed brow and piercéd side And body wounded sore?

In after years they came again In corded robe and cowl, The army of St. Francis’ men, With book and adz and trowel---- And they builded their church and their masses said, And they pastored the living and prayed for the dead, And succored them many a soul:

And the folk of the ancient citadel To Christian rites were born, And they harkened to a Christian bell, And they prayed to Christ each morn---- And sometimes in the fading day Their olden altars, in decay, With plumes they did adorn.

[Illustration: The Dead Pueblo--V

_And the lonely friar with his lifted sign Stood watching the riders in drifting line Pass out to the morning glow._ ]

V

Still do the valley’s ancient hills, Oblivious of man’s passing years, Renew their bloom with the summer sun And gloam with gray cloud-fallen tears:

Above their purple crests still climb The storm’s dark streamers ’thwart the heaven---- Like ghosts of old marauders come Bright-arrowed with the jagged levin:

And still upon the mesa top The dead pueblo’s ruined walls Flare back defiance where the light In crimson splendor o’er them falls:

About the plaza strewn with shards Like phantom footsteps fitful go The phantom winds and idly shift The downs of thistles to and fro:

And sway the purple huaco’s spires, And bend the sunflower’s yellow head O’er wild verbenas lavender And Indian paintbrush saffron-red:

And ruffle faint the placid pool That gathers on the kiva’s floor To mirror still the cloudy forms Pictured upon its walls of yore:

While in the chambers long untrod The broken vigas and the clay Imprinted with the builder’s hand Yet crumble in their slow decay:

And underneath the mounded stones That mark the ancient wall and keep, With gaud and trinket nigh their bones, Do they that builded sleep their sleep:

There, warded by the broken church And tumulus that bears the Rood, Rememberless the ruins lie, Dead, mid the valley’s solitude: