WE BURY OUR DEAD ON BISON PLAINS

    for Kristina, Anna Clara, Ima and RuthAnna

We bury our dead on bison plains.
Five sisters suffer the wind as brothers,
mothers, fathers, sometimes children,
lower in sealed blue steel and brass
through roots of grama and buffalo grass.

Suffer the wind that always blows,
from the south in summer dusty and yellow,
from the north in winter icy and feathered.
Suffer the wind on this prairie of the dead,

where loved ones plant eternal green hopes
in thin bluegrass sucked pale by drought.
Where prairies speak in rhizomes and roots,
the firehard sod, sunsoaked, bisonproofed,
overcomes always, always the anemic seed.

We bury our dead beneath shag bone hills
unchanged from the days five little girls
rolled down their socks in the brick wind shadow
and played tag on tangled hair
white as a brain tanned buffalo robe.

Unchanged in the eyes that bleed blue
in the old faces and not so old,
that squint lines of sun and wind.
Unchanged in the webs of shivering cousins.

We plant seeds. Seeds grow bodies.
We plant bodies gone to seed.
Beneath the empty arcs of circles,
crescent moons, seasons undone,
the hoofstruck prairie waits.


© 1993 by Richard W. Todd

Next Poem