Red Man's Pain
Red Man's Pain
By Linda Hays-Gibbs
Why is it not mine?
The black earth
Or the red clay kind
The swamp or mountain high
All the places where my grandfathers lie
They used to roam free with the buffalo and deer
Before the white man came to see with greedy eyes
they saw my land
So now I cry
I'm needy
And he has me enslaved
If I keep my names he knows; but he took away everything so I chose
To sit silently by as a reminder of what a savage cruel fellow you are
sometimes I think you are kinder
but then I see that same old hate slithering around me
You were much kinder to the black man I see
Cause I'm still here you hate me miserably
You wail about the six million Jews who died
When you killed 22 million of me when you lied and lied and lied and denied
For still this day I'm treated with shame
But you don't know the Red man's pain
The rain, the rain washes the shame
For you've no one to blame
But yourselves
And you can't say you did right
When your hate are wells
For you never let it all come to light
The blankets filled with smallpox
The poisoned food filled with rocks
The winters we were left to freeze
The cries of our dying babies
As they left the living
Lying limp lumps in their weeping mother's arms
You took away a red you screwed her & took a red woman's charms
Dead their hearts when again you took her screaming children away to educate them the white way
Only their skins still testified that they were red till they were dead but as their skins got whiter
Our burdens got lighter all we had to do to be free was be our enemy who we knew we weren't you see
But here we sit on reservations still
Reminders of those you didn't kill
And you hate us still so real we scrape it off our skins with knives of poverty
Our dead cry out from pits of clay
Scars of the past in
Pots we made
Rugs so fine they are priceless now
But never the credit for our civilization can you allow
Incas built towns finer than London Town but
Gold was sought for Spanish crowns so you stripped skin off a piece at a time to make them give all they could find then killed everyone left
But kept all their treasures to melt down to bars of gold for your mankind
For we weren't treated as men
But something beneath our red skin
An animal without family and feelings
But we shout we are human beings
Copyright © Linda Hays-Gibbs | Year Posted 2015
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