Poem #7

The wind, a restless spirit, whispered secrets through the craggy peaks, a language as old as the mountains themselves. It carried the scent of pine and damp earth, a wild perfume that clung to the rough-spun wool of Anya’s shawl. She stood at the edge of the mesa, her gaze sweeping across the vast, untamed expanse that was her birthright. Below, the river snaked like a silver ribbon, a lifeblood for the land and its people.

This was a land where respect was not given, but earned. Where words held the weight of stone and actions echoed through daughter of chieftains, granddaughter of shamans, carried the legacy of her ancestors in her very bones. She was a princess, not of gilded palaces, but of this rugged, sun-drenched territory. Her heritage was woven into the fabric of the mountains, as indelible as the footprints left by ancient buffalo herds.

She remembered the time, not so long ago, when a trapper, his eyes glinting with a familiar, avaricious light, had reached out to grasp her arm, his smile a baring of teeth. He saw a prize, a curiosity, not a person. She had recoiled, her spirit a coiled spring, her voice sharp as a hawk’s cry. “Ask before you touch me,” she had warned, her words laced with the quiet fury of the earth itself.