xxxxv

(0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = )

the clouds billow up above their evening pillars

no

falls romance awash in the memory of a passing dream

you cannot go to where your eyes are lifted

your body is too newly old to risk a tumble

and becomes too tall for itself

wandering away into the closing of a spectacle

striding on silver stilts

the susurrating trees announce your fall

the air withdraws its give

enough is more than we can hold

grandiosity roars between our empty feet

and above our bilious empty heights

the whip cracks within us

to touch for but an instant

the ground below our dream

we roar with recognition

and shed ourselves in a flood of lightless tears

… in the summer of 1890 the Sioux began dancing. The slow, shuffling circle dance was foreign to them, but they made it more dramatic by placing a dead cottonwood tree in the center to be hung with offerings. The cottonwood, the only tall tree of the Plains, was a symbol of life, ever renewed. Then one of their number began making ghost dance shirts - long garments of white sheeting decorated with symbols in red and with eagle feathers at the elbows. Wowoka had a garment of that sort, which he has said would turn away any bullet, though he averred that no fighting would be necessary. Still, more and more men and women wore the white garment. And more and more fell unconscious during the dance, which might last five days and nights without stopping. The dreamers recovered to tell how they met the approaching dead and all sang:

The whole world of the dead is returning, returning.

Our nation is coming, is coming.

The spotted eagle brought us the message,

Bearing the Father’s word -

The word and the wish of the Father.

Over the glad new earth they are coming,

Our dead come driving the elk and the deer.

See them hurrying the herds of the buffalo!

This the Father has promised,

This the Father has given.

from Red Man’s Religion 

Ruth M. Underhill