What the Sachem's Son Told Me

by Brett Rutherford

"Westward, the packed

wagons, the loaded guns,

the sleep-soft watchfulness,

the hoarded-in dreams

of the White Man, west,

west from sea to great river,

from plain to mountain,

then to the final sea

at world's end.

"They took it all:

the redwood groves,

pan-gold streams,

bottomless wells,

peat-soft soil,

the promised land of

no-questions equality.

For them.

"Sometimes we managed

to curtail their dreams,

cutting them off

at the root of a scalp.

Our arrows vectored down,

our carnage a vortex

of vulture-spin and blood.

The earth drank them;

the sky

consumed their bones.

We kept the iron pots,

the buttons and pretty beads.

Their guns became ours.

"In spite of that,

a thousand nations

became but one. They spoke

no other language but their own.

Our people are penned

in all the waste-places,

roach-motel reservations.

No arrow can stop

the six-wheeled megatrucks;

train track and highway vein

the former wilderness.

"But as for you, poet:
Thank you for coming.

Know that our knives are drawn

and could take you out

in a minute, if so we chose.

But since you greeted us

with words you took

from our own language,

and since you are, like us

of those who walk the dreams

and make them into magic,

we will walk in peace together.

"Walk with me now,

away from the sage-smoke.

I will tell you

that our power is returning,

if we learn to wield it

without the white man's poison

forever weakening.

"I have found something,

a survivor of totem days,

I have a manitou,

cousin of Wendigo, Hudson Bay's

wind-walker, elemental.

Cloud-lurker, he evens

the score. Look up!"

The poet sees, in night sky, but lit

from underneath by earth-light,

an airplane departing

from the nearby airport.

“Watch!” the young Iroquois says.

A dark cloud envelops the DC-10 above.

One wing snaps off, and then

the other. It is all the more

horrible that the screams cannot be heard.

"Hunh!" is all the sachem's son utters.

"It gives me no pleasure.

I would rather the earth swallow them

of its own accord, and spare The People.
Our People, I mean."

"Do work on that," the poet urges.

"The outraged planet listens, I am sure."

A smile creases the cracked corners

of the wizard’s otherwise humorless mouth.

"We will still keep their pots and pans,

the motor-bikes and the pretty beads.

"Come to the pow-wow now

and we'll get plenty drunk, poet!"

— Oct. 1982, rev. 2020.