Shalako

The name is like a mantra:
Shalako, Shalako, Shalako.

He's a Big Zuni Bird.
Quirky, imposing, the dead come back to life:
black, white, turquoise, red, yellow & green--
a ten-foot spirit clacking into the night,
dancing with five brother birds,
holding the people's welfare
in his looming gait: one tumble & they're doomed
for the next year.

A loony bird he is,
bug-eyed, with buffalo horns & eagle feathers on top,
raven feathers for a necklace
& a wacky, noisy beak.

Little children stare in awe;
they laugh at mudheads cavorting,
like earthlings come to life.

A bold one pesters the Shalako
who pecks him on the head.
Any human person who touches
a mudhead thus becomes a sex maniac.

The Shalako plants prayer sticks
into sacred earth holes,
covered quickly with corn meal.
A hunter kills him
dead for the winter,
ready to rise again
under the moon, Mother of us all,
creator & destroyer: Shalako,
Shalako, Shalako.

from The Age of the Mother, by Clifton Snider
(Torrance, CA: Laughing Coyote, 1992).
Copyright © Clifton Snider.

This watercolor, called Shalako with Mudhead, is by an anonymous Zuni Pueblo artist, c. 1925.
Coyyright © Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, NM.

This acrylic painting by contemporary Zuni artist Hubert "Patrick" Sanchez is called Kaleidoscope.
Appropriately for a mandala, it is meant to portray the whole of Zuni life.
From the Pueblo of Zuni Arts & Crafts, reproduced in Theda Bassman,
Treasures of the Zuni (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland, 1996).