Mother Lode

The village is Alaskan gold -

not like Nome's.
That glint spends easy:
traded, lost, squandered.
Village ore runs deep,
the mother lode, mother's love.

But cities have their place, they say.
Factories making people pay
their bills for homes and cars and life.
Cities have their place, they say.

Place is fine. I'll make mine
where city's far and home is close.
The village owns the heart and soul.
Not made, it simply is.
The village is.

What of the town, the people place,
where shops with quiet enterprise,
steady hum of lesser ways
than city wild. What of the town?

Less is fine. I'll have mine with lesser still.
Near coast or river, tundra, mount;
village, hamlet, heart, the home;
birthing, living, dying.

Can souls be free in other place, if village gone?

Can father's son his manhood make,
elder's wisdom give;
moose and potlatch, river, stream, 

lake and salmon find their place?

Lesser place spawns lesser souls, or so we think.
But sparks of knowing light the dark,
shades and shadows coming clear.
As home is best of all that is,
so village makes its perfect nest.

The heart longs for what it doesn't know and
cannot have, but longs some more.
The village is the unknown wish,
the place where life and earth are one;
and babies, brides and graves and feasts
are real, and loved the more because.