Long Sioux Poems

Southern Icarus
by Michael R. Burch

Windborne, lover of heights,
unspooled from the truck’s wildly lurching embrace,
you climb, skittish kite...

What do you know of the world’s despair,
gliding in vast solitariness there,
so that all that remains is to
fall?

Only a...

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Poems about Fathers and Grandfathers I

I translated the first six Native American poems for my father when he chose to enter hospice and end his life by not taking dialysis …


Cherokee Travelers' Blessing I
loose translation/interpretation...

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Native American Translations

Cherokee Travelers' Blessing I
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I will extract the thorns from your feet.
For yet a little while, we will walk life's sunlit paths together.
I will love you like my own...

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Salat Days
by Michael R. Burch 

(dedicated to my grandfather, Paul Ray Burch Sr.)

I remember how my grandfather used to pick poke salat ...
though first, usually, he’d stretch back in the front porch swing,
dangling his long...

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Poems about Flight, Flying, and Birds (I)



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

It is the nature of loveliness to vanish
as hummingbird wings, batting against nothingness
seek transcendence...



Southern Icarus
by Michael R. Burch

Windborne, lover of heights,
unspooled from the truck’s wildly lurching...

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Suddenly, two Indian boys throw themselves into the water like meteors
swiming towards camp chatty as prarie dogs,
they hail from a Teton encampment of 74 lodges a few miles up river
most of the men are feeling...

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6 miles up river Arikara are encountered,
they are a people of amenable disposition and are agrarians,
they chuckle with sympathy as we inform them of our grizzly confrontation
and they tell us that disease had forced them...

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The Killing Field”

Ariana nodded, tremolo fingers,
and they ran across the killing field,
watching the steel-toed kite ascend—
a fleeting instant of triumph in the vacuum.
Josh scoffed as it dipped,
both caught in the pull of the abyss,
falling but...

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The Killing Field”

Ariana nodded, tremolo fingers,
and they ran across the killing field,
watching the steel-toed kite ascend—
a fleeting instant of triumph in the vacuum.
Josh scoffed as it dipped,
both caught in the pull of the abyss,
falling but...

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1
We've been riding now, for days
On this dry and dusty plain
Headed to a land, that's never tasted rain
The posse has been thinning out
As men head back to town
So, that just leaves you and me
To track...

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Crazy Horse Monument

Up there! On the Black Hills Mountain, 1
A work in progress sculptured in granite,
Of a stern faced warrior, strong and determined, 2
Unadorned in a war bonnet, with his hair flowing in the wind,
And...

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The delegation arrives in a procession of handsome, barbaric lineage
rugged in animal accoutrements and subdued in the presence of the future's skin,
the women, fine in wild beauty are bejeweled in beads, white and blues
that accent...

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Night one on the new river, the campfire is spirited
and the future appears hospitable,
everyone has their rations, everybody is resting their pride
for on an expedition epic to each man and for a republic as well
souls...

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We briefly meet the Mandan Chief Big White
in the village center where the animals are sacraficed,
couples wed, and disputes are dealt with,
he is a massive, and portly man
and is wearing a headdress that spreads to...

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Translation of Eric Mottram's The Nerves of Proust and Sitting Bull by T. Wignesan

Excerpts from an article, “From space to caves in the heart recreating the collective world in Eric Mottram’s poetry” by Clive Bush,...

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Dream Song of the Thunders
Chippewa saying
translation by Michael R. Burch

Sometimes I bemoan my “plight”
when all the while
the wind bears me across the immense sky.


What is life?
The flash of a firefly.
The breath of the winter buffalo.
The...

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Crazy Horse's Naming Vision
by Michael R. Burch

Earthbound,
and yet I now fly
through these clouds that are aimlessly drifting...
so high
that no sound
echoing by
below where the mountains are lifting
the sky
can be heard.

Like a bird,
but not meek,
like a hawk...

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This house belonged to grandfather Rudolph,
though its history goes much further back,
all the way to the eighteen seventies,
when to this vast land Herbert Blake did trek.

It had once been a grand ranch homestead,
centerpiece of sixteen...

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The summer sun was high. The heat was oppressive.
The whalebone corset dug into the body's tender parts.
Peering from the shop, my hand touching the pane
of dearly brought glass, I feel the vibration of the incoming...

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VISION  QUEST

The Sioux chief Brown Eagle taught me self-respect 
And I saw my life as an Englishman must have greater purpose,
And that these "savages" were actually my saviors.
The spirit of his tribe drew me;...

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(Historical train-ride on the first Transcontinental Railroad in 1870 from Omaha to Ogden aboard the Union Pacific Railroad)     © 2009 (Jim Sularz)


I can hear the whistle blowing, 
two short bursts, it’s...

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I.
Myron Baker wasn’t much of a man
for gunplay, whiskey, or ladies of the night.
He'd made his move out the western way
for space to live his life just as he liked.

He’d gotten himself a good spread...

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Was it her or was it him?
Was it the mixed signals of dixie,                      ...

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II.
It was several days before trouble came,
the quiet seemed at odds with all the news,
the papers told of a nation enraged,
with loud cries for the Sioux to meet their doom.

Myron was out feeding hay to...

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The summer sun was high. The heat was oppressive.
A whalebone corset dug into my body's tender parts.
Peering from the shop, my hand touches the pane
of dearly brought glass it vibrates with the hoof-beat of riders.
The...

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