Native Artifacts

Over dinner, he tells me
about the lecture he attended
on Native American hunting techniques.
My mind drifts, as it does,
and I find it wandering a grocery store
in Minnesota, where a young native man
talked as he bagged my groceries
I wrote a poem about him.
How curious it is, this world where
now that poem is real
existing as firmly as any bone knife
museum artifact, or lecture on its use,
or artist’s rendition on canvas
All of these—knife, lecture, painting, poem
Created objects, our postcard
to ourselves, our note to the world
that we were here