My Tribute Poems to Mike Amado

Photo by Jack Scully

The tribute for fallen friend and poet Mike Amado has come and gone. These are the poems I read in his honor. I would have printed them sooner, but they simply weren't ready until the other night (which is why they weren't printed in the complimentary collection of dedications. I tried my best to use Mike's Native American roots without being too cliche and even tried to write in his style in the case of the second poem (a tritina).


No Beads
For Mike Amado


It’s evening in New Orleans,
and I’m thinking of you
as I’ve finished another day
of teaching about diabetes,
explaining how when entering
a native reservation
that doctors presume 100%
of all residents are diabetic.
I don’t have to explain why
I can say they just do,
and my wisdom will
still be commended.
I’m thinking of you while ashamed
As my tourist co-worker votes
for a buffet in a casino,
Where the ones who get their
money’s worth use wheelbarrows
instead of strollers for their babies.
It’s the first meal I’ve ever
needed A bath afterwards.
Before I bathe, I walk it off,
head down Bourbon Street,
past the buildings where fraternities
throw beads, trying to pass as tribes,
I walk past until the lights are off
passing more and more discarded cats,
and the further I walk,
the more I hear a drum
played by your hand
to mark my footsteps
until I double back
and am forced to march
to the drums of cover bands.


Fighting Stance
For Mike Amado

How does self-proclaimed warrior
bestow additional role of shaman
on oneself for oneself, doing both

in spite of possible tribal charter? Does doing both
cause softening of warrior
calluses, spirits giving silent treatment to shaman?

Perhaps you were enough shaman
to divine inevitability of fate, use both
shaman’s wisdom and last battle cry of warrior.

Warrior’s stance, shaman’s chant, both served you well.