РефератыИностранный языкOnOnline Poems By Wendy Rose Essay Research

Online Poems By Wendy Rose Essay Research

Online Poems By Wendy Rose Essay, Research Paper


Itch Like Crazy: Resistance


This is one of those days


when I see Columbus


in the eyes of nearly everyone


and making the deal


is at the fingertips


of every hand.


The voices beyond my office door


speak of surveys and destruction,


selling the natives


to live among strangers,


rewards fr sine service


or kinship with the Crown.


The terror crouches there


in the canyon of my hands,


the pink opening rosebud mouths


of newborns or the helplessness


of the primal song.


Ghosts so old


they weep for release,


have haunted too long


the burrs and ticks


that climb, burrow and stick.


Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, Piedras,


My Lai, Acteal, Hispaniola, Massachussetts Bay Colony,


my mother, the stones, channels of water,


blood of her veins, every place


a place where history walked,


every ring on Turtle’s Back


a mortar to split our seeds,


every sunflower bursting from asphalt


raises green arms to the sun,


every part of Tewaquachi


has formed the placenta


from which we emerge,


every red thing in the world


is the reflection of blood,


our death and our rising.


Now I dance the mission revolts again,


let the ambush blossom in my heart,


claim my victory with their own language,


know the strength of spine tied to spine,


recognize him when he arrives again,


this hungry one, must feed him


poisoned fish. Must lure the soldiers


into trap after trap, must remember


every bit of this.


source: www.poetryproject.com/rose.html


Margaret Opens the Bon Ton Saloon


Bear Valley, Mariposa Land Grant, California


1859


To let: solid building, two rooms, suitable


for enterprise and hard work:


frontier town on the Mariposa Grant in the southern part of the Mother


Lode. Local Indians pacified and tame. — John C. Fremont, owner-seller


I never liked that man.


My new husband, Maurice,


thinks the world of him.


"John Fremont will be president one day"


he says, with a grand patriotic wave


of his old Prussian hand,


grander than the wave he gives me


when I saddle the mare for a ride.


We would do well enough


to sell sarsparilla and meat,


but Maurice says no;


the miners must have


their Saturday spirits


and we must collect


the coins.


There is not another white woman here.


But I am strong. I listen without flinching


to the cattlemen and miners


explode through the door


from the dust of the road


and settle themselves at the bar.


Let hang the next story writer


who comes to my table


with notebook and camera


to ask of my long memory,


the rocking on the sea


and slow bump of wagon wheels,


neverending tall grass of Missouri


giving way to sagebrush and s

tone,


the high mountain passes,


a multitude of pigeons overhead.


I will not say I was hungry


or that redskins came to our wagon


and frightened me. I say only


that San Francisco was sweet


and the stage to Mariposa


smelled of mens’ sweat


and the cloying perfume


from long petticoats


rustling in the scrub oak leaves


to sop the water


from foothill creeks.


source: www.poetryproject.com/rose2.html


Alien Seeds


(on reading a book about plants growing wild in


California)


How is it that I did not know the gold hillside


near my house


is as foreign to the land as any intruder, as the straight boards


and liquid rock poured onto the land where my house stands?


All these, wild oats, the strangling grass, even the succulents


with the secret of moisture within, the tumbleweed


rode on the tails of strange beasts or were caught


in the wool of Spanish sheep. How can I not feel


the killing, the massacre that cleard the valley, the foothills,


the mountains of my kind? For every seed, its wagon train;


rhizomes colonize underground, spines catch foxes


on their little hooks–barbed wire crosses our nations


and taproots suck the stolen dew


no matter how dry the desert.


Thistles thrive on the most ravaged flesh;


invaders ruthlessly kill just as the bloodthirsty men


who drove their cattle from shrine to shrine


lowered their rifles, aimed, fired.


The Elders have always known this.


They fast and pray, then hunt


for exactly the right kind of grass


as their grandmothers before them;


they pick a few, never the first one,


never more than they need.


They return home with great art in their eyes.


And now they walk forever with empty hands,


baskets made thin with ribs sticking out.


Beads, yarn, safety pins replace beargrass and willow.


Eucalyptus rolls its seeds on the ground,


we slip and fall, hurtle into the sacrifice,


gather not grass but sorrow in our hands.


Vanishing Americans, endangered species,


vermin and weeds, call it what they will,


rock hard places where bones rattle down.


source: www.poetryproject.com/rose3.html


For the White poets


who would be Indian


just once


just long enough


to snap up the words


fish-hooked from


our tongues.


You think of us now


when you kneel


on the earth,


turn holy


in a temporary tourism


of our souls.


With words


you paint your faces,


chew your doeskin,


touch breast to tree


as if sharing a mother


were all it takes,


could bring instant and primal


knowledge.


You think of us only


when your voices


want for roots,


when you have sat back


on your heels and


become


primitive.


You finish your poem


and go back.


source: voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/WendyRose.html

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