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Indian Blue-Bonnets
Each Moon Brings Sorrow
The prairie, a sheaf of long gray grass shaken in tangles of
the thunder moonlight,
Sprinkled fireflies among the black wigwams.
The crane on the lake of the Great Star stuck his bill
through the black clouds . . . flash!
The mountains held their bowl on their finger-tips, catch-
ing quills of lightning.
Laughing, the thunder-moon overturned the bowl of the
mountains:
A film of water ran over the sand-the night-stencil burst,
Confused with figures, buffalo thunder, and the death-
croon of the flood.
At dawn the Cherokees in the hills stood before it,
Saw their wigwams swallowed in a swirl of yellow water,
Saw the flood grip a last hold on the mountain bowl,
And, kicked away by the sun, plunge in a panic.
Branches were black arrows on the yellow crest.
The green-corn moon mopped the prairie,
Went on all-fours through the prostrate grass,
Horse-shoed the new wigwams.
The sunshine shriveled the moult of mud,
Through silver tubes sucked up the Brazos
And the lakes in the mountains.
Buffalo bones caked too dry for wolf-serenaders;
Rattlesnakes and owls shouldered away from the stench
Of the prairie-dog villages;
The trees gathered up their leaves and died.
The wind, touching the icicled grass,
Rattled a snare-drum sound
On the frozen skin of the prairie.
The snow, a mass of white rats,
Scampered down softly from the clouds.
The long-night moon
Buried the ice-forming moon
Under the snow,
And a hunger-moon feebly fingered a tattered prairie.
The Wail of the Prairie
Bury him! Bury him! Bury him,
O my the wind!
Shake his pipe, the blue-smoke pipe,
Heave the water of his bowls!
Nanabozho, his horse, jingles wampum
As the pine shakes its leaves.
"Lonely moon, take my lover,"
The grass sang under the snow.
"He will want to roam the big hunting-grounds
With a rose in his hand for the buffalo.
O Nanabozho, my eyes unto the stars
Even as he looked into the wigwams.
Pieces of wind I bite,
But they will not go down my throat-
Never, Nanabozho."
The maidens made a path of songs for departing lovers;
The wives cut off their hair and smeared their faces with
ashes;
The men wrung the mountains:
Evening into evening found a hopeless sunset.
Going Away to the Clouds
Slide away, snow, slide in death!
Men make a big glow, then black charcoal:
I touch you to die, you touch him.
Hair-wild the medicine comes to me-
Beat my blood! beat my blood!
Down inside I scream like a panther.
Who can speak of the Great Plains?-
Sing their songs to me.
Dancing into Beasts
The camp-fire sat cross-legged,
Squatted and jumped up,
Shook curls of smoke,
Hissed at the cracked voices of the hags,
Swayed with the pound of the tom-tom
And the incantations.
Black nakedness flowing into snakes,
Roll up the grass,
For the smoke of the tom-tom
Swells, swells, swells.
Loins grow from the dirt,
Thunder tumbles out of grunts,
Backs bent double crack and stretch
And fill like lakes with the buffalo spirit.
But out away, thin and light,
An ancestry of wind rushes in,
Tears and peals the skin
From the claws of wolves to their maws.
Out away, thin and light,
Antelope patter;
Noses sting the air;
Slyly pulses quicken,
They shrink and retreat
Under the creeping eyes of the fire.
Then the tom-tom breaks in and out,
Snarls its weird chatter.
And the women scream at the blood it speaks,
The men curve:their jaws;
While stiff as fire they make the dance of trees--
Their black braids, bare branches-
To the mystic whistle of the wing-bone.
The Wind Is Fed with Words
O Great Spirit, look on us-
Empty as the sky
Where no birds blow,
Sad as the frozen water
Where no weeds grow!
Day and night spill back and forth,
Black and white.
Each sweeps away our people
And our lips are tight.
[The medicine man lights his pipe and smokes a peace with
the Great Spirit. The weary Indians are like stumps in
the darkness, silhouetted when the glowing coals jump up
for the buffalo fat fed to their burnt-out bodies. Then out
of a deadly weight of sound arises the answer.]
The Great Spirit Answers
My brow above and my brow below,
White with wind and ashes of snow,
Like a white skin over my despair,
Hide wrinkles of fire.
Curve your smoke to me
Till the cloud lights soften,
Rocking in the arms of wind,
Blue spirits in its arms.
[The medicine man and the Cherokees go to their wigwams,
for the white bird has folded its wings to rest in black.]
Face the Wind and Listen
No medicine man with horns on his head or thorns in his
feet
Could dance so grotesquely as the wind,
When it has the big black thing along.
Nor, rolling words in his mouth,
Could speak all the wind is whispering
To an Indian girl with papoose doll
Pressed to the clouds of her breast:
A doll with blackberry eyes dim as black moons
And long stormy hair of a prairie pony
Streaming over the blue head-dress of a jay-bird.
The wind's secret, like a blue-jay, fluttered before,
Left her sighing.
Old men must be too old to hear the wind.
An Altar of Flames for Her Doll
Indian girl carrying a bud of light,
Golden eagles unwinding from trees
With long wings throw shadows;
But after their passing, the breeze
Will blow a white primrose to a pink primrose,
As your torch blows away the shadows
Into the shaggy grass-with purple hues
Running before you like wild turkeys.
The water tom-tommed against the roots of trees-
No sound to a turtle resting on its marble pillows,
No other wind-noise but its passage
Through the tonal fibres of the leaves.
Only a muskrat felt the gap in silence-
Water sliding through water to a screen of cat-tails-
As an Indian girl, watched by a flying star,
Loosened her bundle of fire.
Fire, fire, you yellow lightning,
Burn like the Great Spirit's face
In the shredded hair of the storm!
Bosom of earth and breath of sky,
Gold sunsets shot with arrows
Crossing like deer,
You make a music of panthers and opal love-songs!
Oh, see and feel that you are burning,
In your liquid glistenings and piercings,
The child of an Indian girl's dreaming!
And when her doll was a cupped-up handful of ashes,
She gave them to the wind for keeping.
Like the Wings of a Bluejay
The Cherokees in the morning, when the sun sprinted over
the mountains,
Saw a great field of blue flowers, like the wings of a jaybird
Rocking their plumes to unseen music.
They heard the songs of birds coming, and soft lights and
green-tree talk,
And the buffalo pounding on the prairie.
For the winter had slipped into the moccasins of spring,
When an Indian girl, lip to lip with the Great Spirit,
Sacrificed her papoose doll with head-dress like the sky,
And formed the Texas blue-bonnets from its ashes in the
wind.