Darkness fades on
her own blood-stained skin
Her body is limp, exposed to the wind
She lies down her hips, paws curled in submission
But all she remembers: take no supervision
The She-wolf’s fur lifts itself
up into ice-blue skies
She has one or two breaths left,
Maybe One just a sigh
She begins a soft moan,
for God’s pillow, she cries
But She never loses heart
even as she dies.
Her eyes would once glisten
Before greed stained the skies
And the buffalo once grazed here,
and the smoke curls would rise
They were coals warm and shiny
and blackened one time,
what’s left now is dullness
and bleak from the lies
As daybreak arises,
Two hawks she did see fly
She prayed up to the heavens
as worms quivvered by
The winter sun sets,
Last horizon, her view
Once children could hear her,
Her call among few
Now she awaits: Grandmother, Grandfather
Oh please now take me, I’ve lost me earth mother
The bullet was shiny, a white man’s prize.
Rounded and silver, it gave him a rise.
My stomach left queezy, my head and heart splitting
It’s the hidden I dread now, legs weak from the spitting
Her shiver, her wheezing
She knows her own suffering
Her witness to rivals
met its end in their rough ring
Was a call to submission
No she-wolf would answer
She gave no permission
So they couldn’t chance her
Was better to finish, in the sky of the moon
at winter’s cold brightness
Then to wait for the noon
So off they had hurried, five drinking gentlemen
With arrows and pistols
to see who would win
The best-looking among them, wore a cross with a dove
His aim was plumb, says it was nature, he loved
Was a derringer bullet, the heaviest draw
That man took his best aim
…and the bullet it saw.
A surprised look, a scream,
Those wolf-eyes’ did gleam,
They darted in anger,
in that waning moon beam.
Was not for the food, nor the fur
that they prized
But the sharpness of the draw
and the sport of it, they would pride.
So down goes the wild one
Spirit leaving the plain
For the savoring of blood
Lest the wild one be tame.
Copyright 2010, 20111, 2012/Nancy Dundatscheck
