- Written after reading Ishi by
Theodora Kroeber
- (8 December 1990 - 6 January 1991)
- after Edwin
Markham
- He looks toward the camera without smiling
- before a world that has murdered his people.
- He stands barefoot in a shirt and frayed tunic
- open at the neck, his collarbones shining,
- his dark skin drawn taut across his cheekbones.
- He has hung leather thongs through his ear lobes.
- He has burnt his hair short. His eyes are clear,
- but we can’t see in them his Yana name—
- no one who knows it is left alive.
- No one can see in his eyes the world
- where he might have lived before the white men,
- learning in his place with his people
- the skills with which a man may gain respect
- among the canyons below Mount Lassen,
- among creeks and scrub brush, salmon and deer,
- utterly destroyed, utterly alone.
- His arms hang loosely at his sides, his fine hands
- curve in, away from us. His eyebrows are raised
- as if to see us as carefully as we see him,
- surrounded by whiteness that represents the light.
