Mark Strohschein

The End of the Medicine Man’s Story

I can’t say I retained much
from the Navajo language & culture
workshop way back in 1996,
except for a story an elder told that day.

The creator placed the Diné people
in the hands of the Hesperus &
Blanca Peaks to the north
and the San Francisco Peaks &
Mt. Taylor to the south.

He said the mountains witness
many things in the Dinétah—
people coming & going, the pain
of the white man’s arrival &
those who desecrate land for profit.

He said his daughter journeyed east
to go to college—Johns Hopkins—
to study Western medicine.
During long phone calls, he talked.

And she mostly cried. Homesick.
And he said this to his daughter,
as if it were indisputable truth:
The mountains miss you.

They say her tears became a river.
When she tired of rowing back home,
she was delivered on the back
of Golden Eagle who negotiated

the four sacred mountains. Her
spirit lifted into sky. She
rained softly as smooth vermillion sand,
into her father’s arms again.

Mark Strohschein is a Washington state poet who resides on Whidbey Island. His poems have appeared in Flint Hills Review, Bryant Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Barren Magazine, Lips Poetry Magazine, The Milk House, The Big Windows Review and in anthologies. Forthcoming work will appear in the Bards West Poetry Anthology, County Lines, and Pictura Journal . His chapbook-length collection, Sanctuary of Voices, will be published by Ravenna Press in late 2025.