from “Bird Horse”
To say
Some Crows are riding upside down
And falling into money
Where the aborted live
In the policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
That’s why the Maker showed the water beings
At the edge of the Big Horn Mountains
As the long otter lives on in white clouds
Trickling down the veins
Next to the star that is light.
Henry Real Bird. Horse Tracks. Sand Point, Idaho: Lost Horse Press, 2010.
Real Bird has been working with the YMCA Writer’s Voice since 1992 as a visiting poet and has shared his work and the Crow language with thousands of students and teachers across Montana. In 1996 he won the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, and he performs annually at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. He has published six collections of poetry and his work has been widely anthologized. From 2009 to 2011 Real Bird served as Montana’s Poet Laureate.
In 2010 Henry Real Bird was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered to discuss his unique experience as Poet Laureate. Listen here.
While the settings in Horse Tracks clearly reference actual locales, it is understood that the book—including its places—is ultimately the product of the author’s imagination. The intent of this literary map is to enrich the reading experience by interpreting those places, not to render them literally or definitively.
Henry Real Bird is a rancher and educator who raises bucking horses on Yellow Leggings Creek in the Wolf Teeth Mountains. He was born and raised on the Crow Indian Reservation in the Crow tradition, and he still speaks Crow as his primary language. Real Bird holds a Master’s Degree in general education from MSU Billings; over the years he has punched cows, worked in rodeos, and taught school from Kindergarten to college level. He began writing poetry in 1969.