Fleeing European horrors,
God's chosen landed at a great rock
on which they built their havens,
their temples, and their theocracies
and squatted the nomadic tribes
ignorant of salvation and so damned
(if human enough to have life
after life at all). Settlers made
manifest their destiny
to exploit, expropriate,
disease, enslave,
blanket, and reserve the savages.
And when the natives resisted
eternal occupation, the settlers,
republicans by then and democrats,
made war and baubles
of redskins.
And now Washington mouths
itself agape in the mirror of the middle east.
James Penha edits The New Verse News.