ON THE PRAIRIE

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn

and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers,

threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea...

Carl Sandburg(1878-1967): Prairie, Cornhuskers(1918).

This is the myth of the colonialist,

one sentence to describe genocide

that ended 13 000 years

of presence, history -

"a thousand red men cried and went away" -

and then the abundant description,

good and ill, of the re-creation

of the land by those

who took the land,

whose taking of the land goes unacknowledged,

the people whose land

it was 

just going away like an ebbing tide

followed by the great tsunami

of those "million white men"

in the myth of the colonialist.

But the colonialist is ever afraid,

in the undocumented people toiling

on his fields he sees conquerors

who will remake the land,

and in himself the one

who would, one day, cry and go away

in the myths of those now toiling

on his fields, the fields

his ancestors took and planted full of corn,

golden fields reddening in the sunset 

(Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields,

the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?),

the past living in him

(not a bucket of ashes, but a flickering fire)

telling how the myths of the future will erase

250 years of presence, history,

leaving him in a single sentence

to pass away in the new beginning

of the still toiling conquerors.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake. I say to

him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a

thousand years is short.

14.07.2025