Poem #8 by Amy Kathryn Allen

The wind, once a troubadour singing tales of sagebrush and soaring eagles, now carries a mournful dirge across the scarred earth. My heart, a drumbeat echoing the rhythm of this land, is a fractured thing, its melody warped by a sorrow as vast as the sky. Peace, a dewdrop on a summer leaf, has evaporated, leaving only the parched ache of memory. This was our breath, our sustenance, this boundless expanse. Now, it is a canvas of conquest, where the vibrant hues of our existence have been painted over with the stark, brutal shades of invasion.

The rivers, those veins of life that pulsed with purity, now run thick with the venoms of a stolen world. The buffalo, the thunder of hooves that shook the plains, the very spirit of our sustenance, have been reduced to scattered bones, their flesh a feast for the insatiable hunger of those who arrived with eyes blind to anything but their own grasping desires. They did not ask, they did not trade, they did not understand. They took. They took the land, the water, the very air we breathed, leaving us adrift in a sea of their making, a people unwelcome in their own ancestral embrace.

And the blankets, oh, the blankets. Not gifts of warmth, but shrouds of a silent, insidious war. They carried the breath of death, a contagion spread not by the winds of nature, but by the calculated cruelty of those who saw us not as fellow beings, but as obstacles to be swept aside. The smallpox, a shadow that fell upon our villages, a betrayal of the shared human experience, extinguished lives with a ferocity that still chills the bone. Our spirits, worn thin by the relentless tide of destruction, choke on the very dust that has settled over what was, and what will never be again. The hollow ache in the heart of my people is a testament to the greed and the cruelty that has stolen our birthright. The Emory cradle boards and shattered rattles made of gourd are now dust scattered across the plains and forest floor.