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.
