Drinks Water

A long
time ago
my father
told me
what his
father
told him,
that there
was once
a Lakota
holy man,
called
Drinks Water,
who dreamed
what was
to be.
This was
long before
the coming
of the
white men.
He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back into the earth and that a strange race had woven a spider's web all around the Lakotas. And he said: "When this happens, you shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land, and beside those square gray houses you shall starve." They say he went back to Mother Earth soon after he saw this vision, and it was sorrow that killed him. You can look about you now and see that he meant these dirt-roofed houses we are living in, and that all the rest was true. Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.
--Black Elk (1863--1950)

inner gorge outside Turquoise Canyon (top)
Manzanita Canyon (below)