“Adobe”

Home is humanity and earth at work together. It is the smallest unit of community, and mirrors the work of the Creator and the practice of the collective. Colorado poet laureate Bobby LeFebre offers a memorial to the adobe.

“Adobe”
by Bobby LeFebre

We have forgotten from whence we came
Confused deities for God
Forgotten about the earth
How we sprung from her
How creator molded us from her clay
How that makes us her children

We have forgotten the holiness of her soil
How it is a sacrament
The way it feels between our fingers.
How she always gives more than she takes

We have forgotten how her mud can make a home
a village
a community
A heart

Adobe

Sacred architecture
Bricks and walls fashioned by bronze hands left to hardened in the sun
Here in the southwest
Where the rivers run
And the ristras hang
And the valleys speak
And the bones of the indigenous rest beneath our feet

We stand

We stand here a library of collective memory
Stewards of the land
Where nature nurtured us
And our grandmothers endured

We,
A people before borders
Old as the wind
We, with stardust on our tongue
And moonlight in our eyes

Adobe

A tradition before machines
A ritual before desecration
A ceremony of the innate
A liturgy of the elemental

Adobe

Take me back
Sing with me a requiem to our past
These notes of inventiveness
These refrains of ingenuity
This mezcla of organic matter standing like an immovable testament to time.