July 13, 2011

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  The Music Beyond The Hill

   

  In the vastness of endless prairie there rises a solitary hillock

  A strange disquieting bump in this otherwise stretched-out treeless land    

  A flat hypnotic wind-whispering of wild switch-grass

  The only sound in this mournful immaterial landscape

   

  It is here on this funereal plain the solitary traveler

  Trudges slowly in sorrowful strides toward the distant burial mound

  Plopped down as if by some heavenly presence

  Upon this unforgiving panorama - spread under great flowing cloudscapes

   

  Buried under the tall solitary mourning-poles are the last possessions

  Of the braves who fell to the Winchesters of the dispossesors

  Sent to rid the stolen land of riff-raff savages and their broods

  And grace it with god-fearing folk who would fence and rekindle the unbroken sod

   

  After the slaughtering… After the murderers rode off… After the rending tears...

  The fallen were raised up and slung - naked and unadorned

  Between the stripped-thin trunks of tree-poles carried from distant forests

  By the survivors hidden in the singing grass

   

  Safe from predators – Their eyes left open for the eternal viewing of celestial spirits

  Unvisited now - because remnants of their tribe have left to follow the western star    

  Those lifeless forms decayed until only bleached bones were visible

  Web-like patterns of human remains - to click ever-so-softly in the freshening breeze

   

  In the sorrowful annals of our dominant race

  No acts of cruelty and betrayal can compare to the vicious destruction

  Of a once-proud and mostly peace-loving culture

  With its belief that all land was sacred - forever remaining free-travelled and unfenced

   

  This assurance was in truth the natives’ death knell –that soft click of bones

  A tolled remembrance - imagined prairie music of a sacramental spirit-bell

   

   

   

   

   

  Note: An article about an Indian reservation exempt from federal regulation

           running a multi-million-dollar world-wide internet poker scam is the reason        

           I reposted this... What have we come to?...

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

  • 9:14 am
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