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