The Ghost Dance, Part I

1. Red Mesa Dreamscapes The sun spreads its red light on the mesas, Those ancient sentinels, those fractured bones of the Earth Scattered outposts that rise as lonely islands Through the vast dry sea That fills the heart of this continent; Its heart beats in notes slow, deep and sonorous Buried somewhere deep in its weathered flesh Of canyon, mountains, desert - All cast adrift upon this sea of hollow, howling spaces. The mesas thrust themselves up, pointing at the sky Like great bony fingers cut short at their last joints, Reaching into the merciless deepblue immensity Falling down on all sides, enfolding the distant horizons, Where the light of the nearby yellow star Goes shifting to red as this side of the Earth turns its face slowly away, Burning in soft rose light Caressing the cooling arms of the night in the brown flesh of the land, So like the flesh of its people. Dawnings and sunsets, ages and ages, the red light washes the mesas Turns of the world beyond counting as the people gazed mute in wonder Standing in the purity of the red light Bathed in its clean magnificence, purified by its brutal beauty, As alive in their way, these bones of a planet Alive as the strong brown flesh of the people Who gazed on them in sanctified silence The ancient people who took this land for their home Long ago, when Man was new and still fearfully reverent; These ancient ones were meant to live and die Beneath this endless paradise of blue, To love this land at times in ways too deep For any civilized mind to comprehend. The brown ones loved this land, And the land accepted their love in bountiful return to them In the fullness of the life and glory they once knew here, Singing to them in the eagle's screams that cut the still air Drumming in the brown waves of bison herds Speaking to their souls in Winter winds and coyote howls, Rumbling in the dark voice of Summer thunderings Carrying down to the ears of men the mystic troubles of their gods.l They passed together a long, still time The people and the land. The balance smooth between them, Until the coming of the Others. From across the Great Waters the Others came, Beings white in both appearance and deed. They walked and talked like other men. But their ways were new and strange. They came and they came, More with every shift of the seasons Filling the land Like snow fills the forests in Winter. They came, taming all that they touched, The world to them a thing to be conquered and changed, For this was their way; this their lives' purpose, And the spirits of the land allowed it - Neglecting their invasions, accepting the smallness of their thoughts, Aloof and above in distant toleration. Without the Spirits' help the people lost their fight for the land, Falling ever back against the Others' strange magics. More clever than strong they were, But in the end, it's cleverness that wins. They drew their strength from the magic words Gifted to them by their god, With which they would call on him for the powers of conquest, The words were: Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny granted them terrible powers, The powers to build a new thing, A thing which propelled itself in a way that none could stop, Its name was Progress. Progress, right hand of Manifest Destiny, Made everything change, Chang above all, an end in itself Is what the Others loved best. The brown ones could not comprehend it, So they lost all before they fully knew it to be happening. How to fight those armed with an oath from their god? Through his will they held their power, Never doubting the right of it. For their love their god returned them power, The magic of the metal tubes that boomed a hard burning death, Weapons no magic could stop, And more than this, numbers, Numbers to drown the land. Against all resistance they claimed the land for their own. The survivors they sent away To wait out their time in being forgotten, Casualties of Fate. So now, the red light spreads across the mesas Changed parts of a changed land that goes by another name Part of a new nation vast of size and strength Terrible in sleeping might, Kindhearted giant, great and noble in its way, Though forgetful of its native sons. Where now hangs the eagle's scream? - Lost, blown apart upon the wind. Where do the great gods of Old hide their faces? - They sleep, infusing the Earth with their dreams. Where walks the demon named Progress? Only look, its mark is everywhere. Now we live in the long forgetting-time, When the wrinkled elders sit in their ramshackle homes The driftwood of some primeval sea's recession, And dream. They dream, in a fog blurred with the alcohol poison, Of the stories of fathers and grandfathers, Tasting memories again and again, The salt lick of remembered moments aging like strange wine. They dream of the ending-time, Of the last stand made In the face of the endless advance When Progress buried the world in its relentless avalanche, The dream of the wearied few, Worn and shaken in disaster's wake, Gathered one last time on the heartless plains. They take a long straight look into the land of the Dead, The shadowland out of sight beside our own, Where the gone-before walk and watch in silence The steady procession of the living, Existing as memories until the time of reunion.