LEGEND OF WHITE BUFFALO CALF WOMAN

by Joanne De Simone Reynolds

Reported birth of rare white buffalo calf in Yellowstone park fulfills Lakota prophecy: “The birth of this calf is both a blessing and warning. We must do more,” said Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota and the Nakota Oyate in South Dakota, and the 19th keeper of the sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman Pipe and Bundle… Lakota legend says about 2,000 years ago—when nothing was good, food was running out and bison were disappearing—White Buffalo Calf Woman appeared, presented a bowl pipe and a bundle to a tribal member, taught them how to pray and said that the pipe could be used to bring buffalo to the area for food. As she left, she turned into a white buffalo calf. “And some day when the times are hard again,” Looking Horse said in relating the legend, “I shall return and stand upon the earth as a white buffalo calf, black nose, black eyes, black hooves.” A similar white buffalo calf was born in Wisconsin in 1994 and was named Miracle, he said. —AP, June 14, 2024. More photos by Erin Braaten here at YouTube.

When a bison calf appears white-furred

On a patch of yellow stone prairie 

The People know it is mine   Me:

Dark-haired/Dark-eyed 

When first I came to them   Yes:

Miracle   Yes:

Sacred-birth leucism   Rarest

Of rare   Lakota-blessed prayer   Grass-

Rolled   And a pipe I left   Change

Among the geysers/Great

Change meaning What most excites

Returns   Like hunger   Just totally totally

Floored a woman says in a baseball cap:

White   Holding a camera: a long-range lens

 

 

Joanne De Simone Reynolds would like to acknowledge Nadia Colburn, of Align Your Story, and Tom Daley, both of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for their indispensable writing workshops; Doug Holder, of Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, for his ongoing support; and Susan Richmond, poet and children's book author, who coaxed Ms Reynolds into Plein Air Poetry at Old Frog Pond in Harvard, Massachusetts, a collaboration of poets that lasted ten years and produced as many, beautiful, chapbooks. She is grateful to all.

BIERSTADT'S CHIMNEY ROCK

by Bill Sullivan

on the anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre,

December 29, 1880

From the Collection of Colby College Museum of Art: Albert Bierstadt, "View of Chimney Rock, Ohalilah Sioux Village in the Foreground" (1860).

Eighteen sixty—in his Manhattan studio

Albert Bierstadt studies his year-old photographs

and oil sketches of the Great Plains and foothills

of the Rockies. He then turns to his images of 

the Lakota, the Oglala Sioux and his collection

of their artifacts. He pauses, fills his brush with

oil paint, approaches the board sitting on the easel,

saying silently, "Everything must glow, must shine

like the soft rays of the sun." He adds more dove gray

to the last of the low clouds; steps back, saying, “Yes,

it's all there and more, the luminous amber sky,

the aquamarine river, the lush green bushes

on the bank, the soft shadows, the warmest of suns."

 

And there are the two horsemen in the shallow water,

one with child mounted in front, the other to his right

relaxed, but with a rifle at his side. Far right a woman,

water to her waist, ready to do the morning wash

and on the bank three tepees, shelter for this band

and just beyond another man riding off for the day's

hunt. And all the carefree children and unleashed dogs

scattered about. It is family, clan and tranquility,

life beyond what is and will be and he knows that.

 

Knows that when he includes Chimney Rock—

a storm shaped relic of a violent volcanic past,

a weathered cone that rose some three hundred feet

above the prairie grasses and became a marker for  

the fur traders, Mormons and pioneers tramping a trail

west—to Oregon and California. Knew it when he

and the government surveying team followed the North

Platte River reached the structure, examined the gifts,

messages and drawings left by previous travelers—

determined dreamers who heeded the prophets' call:

"Go west! Our destiny!  God's will! This land, ours from

the Atlantic to the Pacific." Now the creaking oxcart

and wagon, soon the hiss and steam of the locomotive.

 

He places the prominent rocky tower in the distant

background, makes it appear insignificant,

but knows his idyllic world would soon bleed.

He did not conjure up the brutal chapters then—

the butchery, expulsion, internment, deprivation

and suffering. But his life spanned the tale. Yes, he

lived long enough to read the reports of the massacre

at Wounded Knee. Lived long enough to examine

the photos of the corpses—men, women and children—

being tossed into a mass grave—lived long enough

to ponder the photo of Chief Big Foot's frozen body

lying in the blood-soaked snow—his cupped hands

outstretched as if reaching out for his slain followers.

 

And what did Albert say that late December day?

Did he think of that halcyon scene he had painted

thirty years earlier? Did he shrug his shoulders,

conclude that it had to be, or did he weep?       

 

 

Before retiring to Westerly, Rhode Island, Bill Sullivan taught English and American studies at Keene State College, the University System of NH. He has co-authored two studies of twentieth century poetry and co-produced two documentary films. Here Am I, Send Me, The Journey of Jonathan Daniels, aired by numerous PBS stations, streams at PBS.org. His poems have appeared in numerous print and on-line publications. Loon Lore: In Poetry and Prose was published in 2015 by Grove Street Press. 

WALKING DEAD

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

The Lakota people  consider the Black Hills to be sacred ground; it was originally included in the Great Sioux Reservation. The United States broke up the territory after gold was discovered in the Black Hills. The mountain into which the Rushmore figures wer carved is known to the Lakota Sioux as Six Grandfathers. Photo: Six Grandfathers circa 1905. Source: Wikipedia.

On the eve of the fourth
in Lincoln’s shadow
on sacred ground
of the Lakota and Cheyenne
downwind of the dust
of an unfinished bust
of Crazy Horse
not one of his kin asked for
a sitting president defending
the Stars and Bars
its politicians, generals and adjutants
to extolling chants of

USA! USA!

What do you say to a drop in
from a fortified copter flying
the Great White Father
over crowds of people whose lands
these stone monstrosities smother
carvings made at the hand of a man
who sympathized with the Klan
a troupe of Confederate brethren
keeping alive the dream of Calhoun
interposition, the antebellum masculine
to thwart a more perfect union?

Carve the face of the great emancipator
beside slaveholders and Teddy R.

I think the fourth is in danger of becoming
a mausoleum because we do not vet
the monument builders
history stalks the land like the undead
in a high ratings show many of us watch
on television.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. Recent work is appearing at Isacoustic, So It Goes, Muddy River, Wilderness House Literary Review, and The Right Life.

THE WEIGHT OF WATER

A Rhupunt by Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

The white man buys
With gold-plate lies.
His honor dies
On rocks that stand.

With greed, with guile,
Pale fists defile
The streams with bile
That poisons land:

“Hail, bottom line!
For leaks, a fine;
Let squaws drink wine!”
We understand

Their appetite
For oil will blight
Our sacred site,
Yet they demand

We yield this ground.*
Despoilers pound
The earth, and mound
Its bones and sand

With metal paws.
The hungry jaws
Of drill that gnaws
Devour our land.

Their serpent’s bite
Pours black of night
Through earth despite
Our protests and

Appeals to law.
So from the maw
Of death we claw
The dead, command

Their ghosts with dance,**
Add spear and lance
Of spirits’ stance
To human hand.

We string each bow
With words, strike blow
In court; the snow
We will withstand.

Foes agitate
With stones of hate;
Lakota wait
On rocks that stand.

* Current plans call for the Dakota Access Pipeline to pass under the Missouri River less than one mile upstream of the Standing Rock Reservation.  The Lakota have protested on the grounds that the project will contaminate their sole source of drinking water and disrupt their sacred lands.  



**By 1890 the Lakota faced starvation as a result of the U.S. Army’s systematic decimation of the buffalo, their primary food source. Members of the tribe began to practice the ghost dance, which was said to harness the spirits of the dead to fight on behalf of the living.  Sitting Bull was arrested for refusing to stop this practice, and the resulting conflict led to his death and the subsequent massacre of his supporters at Wounded Knee.

Elizabeth Spencer Spragins is a linguist, writer, and editor who taught in North Carolina community colleges for more than a decade.  Her tanka and bardic verse in the Celtic style have been published in England, Scotland, Canada, and the United States.  Recent work has appeared in Quarterday Review, Society of Classical Poets Journal, Bamboo Hut, Skylark, Atlas Poetica, Halcyon Days, and Peacock Journal.  She lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA.

ON NOVEMBER 11

by Gil Hoy

"Custer's Last Stand" by Harold von Schmidt. Image source: Smithsonian.

Veterans Day Weekend 2014

On November 11, honor the brave dead

from Afghanistan and Iraq, heroes against
German and Japanese imperialism

and the sacrificed souls in “the war to end
all wars.”

But also thank Custer’s soldiers
for not completing the genocide.

I went to bed and dreamt that Sitting Bull
saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in a vision quest

and then dropped an A-Bomb on Washington, D.C.

to stop invading Custer
from killing his women and children
like so many insects.

Upon awakening, I discovered that America
attacked Iraq for weapons of mass destruction

after murderous
pecuniary munitions manufacturers
crumbled twin towers
with their boomerang missiles

because recipients of evil often do evil in return.

Russian troops rhythmically
marched in the Ukraine,
a cruel video
beheaded a journalist,

ruinous bombs reined down
on rubbled villages of the weak,
and a bullet to a private’s leg became gangrene
as sepsis spread to amputation and death.

An obscure philosophy book said
that Custer should have refused
to attack renegades

because the Black Hills were the Lakota’s by treaty

and that God had ordered Custer’s men to lay down
their weapons or be shot for insubordination.

By river rapids, a sweating grimacing squaw
watched the blue cavalry approach as
she gave birth to a red son,

who drew his first breath,
wailed loudly and coveted white milk.


Gil Hoy received a B.A in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a law degree from the University of Virginia. Gil also is an elected member of the Brookline, MA Democratic Town Committee, and served as a Brookline Selectman for 12 years. Gil studied poetry at Boston University, and started writing his own poetry in February of this year. Since then, Gil’s poems have been published in Soul Fountain, The New Verse News, The Story Teller Magazine, the Clark Street Review, Eye On Life Magazine, and Stepping Stones Magazine.

SAND SONG OF MESOPOTAMIA

by Rob Cook

A wood thrush egg thrown out of the nest by a cowbird. (Image source: Tales From the Wild)

Today I wrote a song in which Syria moved its militia into a pregnant woman’s bed.

Today I wrote a song in which a shoe, and all the sinews enslaved to that shoe, were filled with swarms of infant IEDs.

Today I pollinated a song whose final flower with petals of butterfly warheads fled Iran.

Today I praised a song for the babies born with six mouths, six legs, six skinless stomachs, and a six-billion year half-life inside the furnace of every Iraqi sand tear.

Today, by destroying a song, I made sure there were enough beds and chairs to blunt a room’s nothingness, which means a never-ending scorpion’s thirst, its memory of the desert that doesn’t die.

Today I stole a song in which the homeless built houses and raised families and food that will continue growing inside their sunburned entrails.

Today I blamed a song in which the Midwestern snow originated from a drone’s healing circle many Pakistans away.

Today I excavated, from a plant’s groin, a song that infected the Madonna Mafia with a melodic sequence of sonar terrorism.

Today I exchanged a song for the terrorist elephants, the terrorist giraffes, the terrorist oxygen, the terrorist fern forests, the terrorist mercies of medicinal marijuana, the terrorist sunsets, the terrorist shark sleep, the terrorist carrots and celery and kale that do not leave the body, the intestinal photos of the Gaza Strip taken from the cries of a child, the war on shadows, the war on people who find enough to eat without having to plant pancreatic spores in the hells of the soil, the creek bed Lakota whose fully-subsidized drinking earns the status of enemy activity, and though I saved his name on a dollar that trusted me once, I won’t discuss the terrorist child helping a turtle find its little door in the terrorist grass.

Today I climbed to the top of a song that hid the houses inhabited by live chess pieces pillaged for money that can’t be comforted or fed or held in the hand.

Today I developed a song for the water as it died.

Today I protected a song for the water as it was ridiculed.

Today I harvested a song for the water hidden one carbon minute away in the mirages that revealed another child thriving from dehydration.

In the song I can locate the Syrian helicopter nests.

I can count all of the wind’s bodies.

I can count and remove those who’ve made it to the gas chambers of heaven.

In the song I can count the salvations taken from a child’s amputated leg and copy the Western patriotism that nourishes from far away his dirt dinners and his bomb wiring and the syringes used for drinking and for putting the rain back together.

I can abandon that song by deleting the shadows the child leaves unchecked as he crawls through the artillery-cold heroin forests of Afghanistan.

I can dismantle the song by betraying each bird when it sees the child leading his headless animals into the cruel churches of my hand.

Today I beat the last song to death with a bullet casing I stole from the rubble of all the songs that would never make anyone happy again.

Today I felt no remorse for the songs and their misplaced blessings.

Today I reported both hands for their terrorist ambitions—the one that grows its own grain and the one condemned for hiding every song inside the dust hospital where God sleeps by himself with the only feather that survived.

Today I promised I would protect his otherwise secure kingdom, safe because it remains empty except for the sins of a wood thrush weeping


Rob Cook's work has recently appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Zoland Poetry, Aufgabe, Rhino, A cappella Zoo, Caketrain, Weave, and Best American Poetry 2009. His most recent book is Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade. He lives in the East Village where he co-edits Skidrow Penthouse with Stephanie Dickinson.

DIFFICULT TO SWALLOW

by Buff Whitman-Bradley





Lakota grandmothers in South Dakota
Report that the Department of Social Services
Illegally places Lakota children in foster care
Away from their communities
And extended families
And that those children are continually dosed
With an array of psychoactive drugs
Thus providing pharmaceutical corporations
With a lucrative market
As well as a ready supply of guinea pigs.
When two Lakota children’s noses
Would not stop bleeding
From the medications they he were being fed
Instead of discontinuing the drugs
Doctors sutured their nostrils shut

I know there are those who believe
That humanity is making moral progress
But I see progress in the opposite direction:
As the forces of accumulation and profit grind on
They have become ever more monstrously creative
And efficient
And effective
At mangling lives
Decimating communities
Torturing bodies
And pulverizing spirits.

The good Dr. King told us
That the moral arc of the universe
Bends toward justice
But if I were a little Lakota boy
Stolen from my people
Used as a lab rat
Gagging on the blood pooled in my throat
From a sewn-up nose
I might find that
Difficult to swallow.


Buff Whitman-Bradley is the author of four books of poetry, b. eagle, poet; The Honey Philosophies; Realpolitik; and When Compasses Grow Old; and the chapbook, Everything Wakes Up! His poetry has appeared in many print and online journals. He is also co-editor, with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley and Sarah Lazare, of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.  He has co-produced/directed two documentary films, the award-winning Outside In (with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley) and Por Que Venimos (with the MIRC Film Collective).  He lives in northern California.