Finding My Religion

 

That summer we pretended 

we were orphans,

two sisters torn apart 

by misfortune,

 reunited by happenstance

with only Earth 

to parent us. 

Hair matted thick from days

of hill country winds

and no one to make us bathe,

we decided on a movie star archaeologist,

Indiana Jones, as our role model.  

A dusty middle-aged man,

Indiana lived freedoms 

bold enough to mythologize, 

reckless enough to mute 

our fears of becoming women.

Like him, we quested the sublime,

raided pecan trees for robin eggs, 

jammed sticks under fallen limbs

anxious to find

where rattlesnakes hide.

We discovered God  

in what confounded us, 

like a rusted tractor

broken apart by a live oak,

a parable of Nature 

always winning in the end. 

We scoured parched ground 

for evidence of ancestry

near a waterless aquifer 

that split and angled the land 

into uselessness.

There scattered among cypress and madrone,

we found spear points 

the length of our hands,

evidence of Paleo-Indians

some 15,000 years before

our first breaths.

We nurtured 

stories of ancient relatives 

eating acorns and blackberries, 

roasting squirrel and jackrabbit, 

spearing bison and deer,

living in tents too small to keep secrets,

with children who belonged to everyone 

until old enough to roam free —

moving where they wanted, 

discarding what they no longer needed,

but never each other.