Praise for the Dust Devil
By: Sharon Suzuki-Martinez
Walk through the Arizona desert in the summer, and you will hear an eerie hissing and rattling.
The O’odham call it sivlik, the black snake wind that disorders your mind.
It was settlers
watching from covered wagons who named these spinning windstorms, dust devils. Bringing
their fears from abroad, they saw dark restless spirits. A land of demons.
The first time I saw
one, someone called it el Diablo and showed me how to form a cross with my fingers to stop it
from cursing me or worse, stealing my soul. I still do it to be safe.
A black hole spins at the center
of our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way. Perceived from light-years away, we look less like spilled milk
and more like a colossal dust devil dreaming.
Mini twisters form when a pocket of hot air
rises and rotates through cooler air. They have the calm eyes of tornados. Generators of
electricity, they are like all living things.
They cause distress and messes but the O’odham
suggest the sublime side of sivlik by weaving its dark eye and serpentine twists into exquisite
winnowing baskets.
Call them what you wish, these fleeting beings made of wind and earth. They
who roam without regard for walls. They who reach for the heavens to remind us we too are
stardust.
Sharon Suzuki-Martinez won the Washington Prize for her latest book, The Loneliest Whale Blues (The Word Works), and the MVP Prize for her first book, The Way of All Flux (New Rivers Press). She grew up in Hawaii and now lives in Tempe, Arizona on the homeland of the Akimel O’odham. SharonSuzukiMartinez.com