​POETRY  -  
          With a Theme of Time 

"The East wind carries chanting from the forest"

​Photo by Weebly

Ancestors’ Dance
​ (Dedicated to my grandmother from Ukraine)
By Pamela Pitt

The East wind carries chanting from the forest.
Chants from our Ancestors.
Mournful words tell us the Cossacks are coming.
The Cossacks want our land. The Cossacks scheme to eat our crops so they will get larger and we will have less energy to fight them.
They gorge themselves so that they blot out the sun.
The Bolsheviks are coming.

Our Ancestors increase the rhythm of their sorrowful singing to urge us to fight.
The staccato sound brings us to our feet. 
We start to dance. We whirl.
We form a circle of protection.
We put the children in the middle.
The Russians plot for our children to labor for them on our land.
The Nazis are coming.

We walk through the forest carefully so as not to step on the saplings. They will be beautiful, strong trees. On our land.
We whisper so the Nazis will not know where we are. 
Soon our whispers become plans. 
We use the energy from our dancing to design our plans and
Beat time to the sounds of the gunfire.

The Russians have fortresses in the hills that have been built and fortified by their plunder from other tribes.
We project our love and strength over our lands. We chant for our homes and our animals.
The Russians are coming.
We can hear the loud voices of the Red Army coming through the forest. Their words are strong, their voices loud. Our children are confused.
We turn to our Ancestors. We start chanting with them. We teach our children to chant, trying to drown out the voices of the Army.
The Oligarchs are here.

We march forward to the rhythm of the chanting.

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​After becoming an attorney, Pamela Pitt graduated with an MFA (1990) from the San Francisco Art Institute. She showed her photography work nationally in group and solo shows. Seeking daylight after years in the dark room, she worked on collage with mixed media painting and photography. Ideas from social issues became the basis of certain collage series:
2014: ripped pages from a law book on the “Patriot Act” to use as collage elements.
2016: used tissue dress "Patterns" in a series about the place of women.
2017: produced a collage series based on the concept of making land a commodity. 
With her current focus on photography and scanner digital art, Pam works on achieving peace through creativity and beauty.

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