After Wounded Knee
David Hill
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2015 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Tom Howard, Poetry
On December 29 of 1990, Oglala Lakota ("Sioux") riders completed an arduous, three-hundred-mile horseback ride, from the middle of the North Dakota–South Dakota line to the Wounded Knee cemetery on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The ride commemorated the centennial of the Wounded Knee massacre. The ride is now held annually and it symbolizes the on-going journey that is part of, as Black Elk said, "the mending of the sacred hoop of the people." Some of the elders, younger men, boys, and now women and girls, honor through the ride the three hundred American Indians, non-combatants, women, men and children, who were killed at Wounded Knee by the army in 1890 and buried in a mass grave.
Unfortunately, many Lakota, especially young adults and teens, have committed suicide on the Pine Ridge Reservation, partly as a result of the attempted cultural destruction characterized by the massacre and its aftermath.
Recently deceased Lakota, and also living elders, are shown respect with an honoring dance at pow-wows by younger generations. And fulfilling Black Elk's prophesy of a more promising future, more buffalo are now on more reservations, even as the ride to Wounded Knee itself forms a strong continuity through the generations by building personal and ethnic identity now and for the future.
AFTER WOUNDED KNEE
In Memory of Irving Jumping Eagle 1943-1973
I
A spring of blood
flows through one hundred years
after the winter kill
felled lodge pole pines (bones
of the tipis' buffalo skins) tipis
stripped from a prairie
of time swelling
far beyond the cemetery
after Wounded Knee
when everything died except the wind—
and the wind brought blue clouds,
an almost promise of rain—
blue clouds in a dark red sky
split by yellow lightning
lighting prairie fires
burning across boundaries
of sage brush, thistles, barbed
wire and high tension
lines a trickster's silver spider web
holding the world together
even as it holds
a world apart,
a world of roads mud high
ways of getting no
where if you get away
or go back or never
leave with your body
crossing boundaries tying
passing inside time
not passing for a hundred years—
while a black horse gallops
down the middle of a silver spider web,
mane and tail flying in a wind of time
passing Pine Ridge
after Wounded Knee.
II
Great grandfather grandfather father killed
in wars—
it was a wonder
you even finally were
alive, Jumping Eagle
And we of the treeless forests
of housing developments
and romantic Indian
images loved you, Jumping Eagle,
even when a cowboy president moved the frontier
so far west it was East,
where you flew, as it was better
being a warrior three times
in Vietnam than not fighting here—
easier getting high getting down
when you jumped from planes,
spreading your wings,
filling the sky from cloud to cloud,
a screaming eagle jumping to the earth.
It seemed important, for a while,
to forget there what was here—
easier to do, for a while,
than being the Indian
in the Anthropology Department
when you came back east from the East.
And still looking for you, Jumping Eagle,
after finding your office
door locked and a feather
on the floor in the hall,
it was found you'd left
soon after the last ceremony,
when you'd finally folded your wings
and put them inside your diploma
before you took a bus
back to the reservation,
where you drove a blue Ford
across the sand-colored summer grass
of Pine Ridge, up across Paha Sapa, the sacred
mountains, and on beyond silver-blue sage brush plateaus
to higher mountains yet—then down to the hills
of picture window houses by the blue-gray sea
and the bay of San Francisco—
where your wife waited,
black hair in braids,
high cheek-bone face
serene as she opened her door
Soon your boy was
running on the edge
of a shadow of a ridge—
But you could not be
changed by the present, Jumping Eagle,
as you felt the memory of your childhood
and your expectations were still trapped
on the reservation, like an eagle
inside a thicket of thorns,
a thicket that will bloom
with flowers—when eagles
can fly out and higher than before,
having molted their feathers
for more powerful wings—
when mouths no longer
scream under the earth
at Wounded Knee—
and riders follow the trail
the massacred would follow—
riding three hundred miles
and one hundred years
across the prairie snow,
following a holy medicine man
carrying the feathered staff
with its sacred willow hoop—
And under the winter sun
the riders circle the mass grave,
circling around to the past
to come back from that place
they never leave—
even as they go on—
while more riders circle in the snow.
III
Jumping Eagle, you are not there
Not there, yet you are—
soaring from the bridge
above the golden gate—
but even as your body
hits the white choppy waves
your spirit wings are beating
to the drum heard by feeling the unseen
seen as the earth and the people,
the people who are held together
by the great circle of the drum pounding
with their blood
IV
Your wings beat silently, Jumping Eagle,
to the sound of the spirit
within the silence within the drum
between the pounding of the sticks of time
beating like the echo
of the pounding hooves of buffalo
returning to the center of a nation,
where the dream of the holy man
will be seen again in colors
heard as songs as the singers sing
to honor the dead,
and to honor the alive,
while the dancers dance
in the warm earth dust
as the people of the sacred hoop
dance the circle around the center
the center towards which you flew, Jumping Eagle,
flying now, flying high—
flying towards the blood-red sun.
