written on stone

petroglyphs

what do petroglyphs say?

for thousands of years Indigenous peoples

wrote stories in stone,

I savor finding red panels of arid sandstone 

throughout the American Southwest,

I imagine each felt called to create lasting line and shape

of what shouted at them to be heard and held,

so that their today would connect 

with their yesterday and maybe their tomorrow,

that meaning could be wrested from their moments,

or maybe it was just something they had to do,

as the spirit throbbed through them:

sometimes representational of human and animal form,

and of story that can seem obvious:

a hunt, a battle, a direction to water,

of violence, of conflict, of insight,

most often enigmatic to us now:

power without clarity,

shouts of then with no thought of us now,

maybe no thoughts but only feelings,

maybe the ones who lovingly, intensely pecked away at the rock

were driven to do so, driven to say something with their hands,

I savor reading of a journey to understand,

of one man's quest to let the truths

those long-ago etchers needed to say with shapes on the stone,

he writes of hours experiencing the petroglyphs personally,

of talking with them, of asking of them,

of finding the right times to be there to see them true

to what their makers wished for them to say, to reveal,

he listens to current Pueblo people talk of them

within their own living tradition,

to make sense of them within their culture,

descendant from those writers on stone,

the spiral particularly speaks to me,

a character often used on the panels,

but elusive, only approximating,

the ideals, of the feelings, welling up from within

at Chaco Canyon the spiral seems to be of the Sun

in one petroglyph that shows Pueblo Bonito

and its shapes in relationship to the sky,

and also on that butte a means to chronicle 

the Sun's relationship with the Earth and seasons,

Equinoxes, Solstices, even of the Moon and its 19 year cycle,

yet for a Zuni the spiral might instead mean change,

a basic inherent reality

the dust devil,

water circling down a hole,

stars connected in the sky,

of the inevitability of the constancy of change

and of a still center within all the whirling,

of a truth we can only imagine we understand,

for me, the petroglyphs, the pictographs,

speak to how the best within us

can use art, symbols, like writing, like this poem,

to look out at the world,

to look in at that within us

which aches to understand, to create, to express,

I can only hope that my words

share that grand desire that these long-ago peoples 

worked hard to understand,

to release something true of why we're here,

and of what the universe hopes for us to be, to say,

for us to unlock meaning from the chaos

that can easily encompass our days,

we can only hope to lightly touch

what they who created these petroglyphs hoped to mean with them,

even better we can let them throb with power before us, just be themselves,

and help us in their being learn how to stretch toward fullness.

by Henry H. Walker

July 20, ‘26

Suggested book: Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau, craig childs