You were never much for the soft word or sentimental touch.
God alone knows how you survived those early years,
the unwanted hands of the man who should have fought off the boys who would maul you that way many years later.
The elders blamed you, a three year old child, a seductress; sent you and your older sister off to pervert another tribe in Oklahoma,
and exiled your mother for having the sheer audacity to raise a stink about your treatment.
Small wonder you married a white man; smaller still the wonder that he was white trash and proud of it.
You told me once that for all the bluster, he was gentle with you, and how you needed that. Ambivalent about love and ***, you taught what you knew.
When you found the knife your daughter kept under her mattress to fend off her older brother's hands, you taught what you didn't know.
You would be horrified that the horrifics above would be published; after all, every family has blood on their sheets that should never be laundered in public.
The droplets of blood on your childhood sheets, sequestered for half a century poisoned you,
and ate away the delicate fabric of love with which you bound old wounds.
Your faith, your Truth allowed no special days save the day Christ died; so today is just another day, excellent and fair.
You forgave us our anger without fully understanding why we were angry; it's taken years and bitter lessons to discover what a difficult gift that was to deliver.
The last memory of you: You turned to me as I pushed your wheelchair along the sidewalk, and said,
I never thought it would be you, here.
One of my mother's favorite aphorisms was, "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar".