Taoyateduta (Little Crow)

The angels I know of do not dress in white.

He was a blackened tongue, branded by

the sight of Washington, the unwelcome

prophet whose ominous caws went unheard.

He flew into the cloudy sky head-on, not shedding

an inch of his darkness. “We cannot win,”

he told his braves, staring out into a pale sea,

“but I will die with you nonetheless.” And so

he passed, with his mouth stuffed full of firecrackers

and his body full of holes.

We celebrate our Independence Day by burning out

the tongues of the conquered, hoping that one day

the people we have slaughtered will die. But angels

cannot die. After all, it is you, Wowinape, who, after

spreading your feathered wings, wander out

into the land shrinking before you, trying to remember

when your life became an afterlife. How long ago did we die?

you wonder, and where in this shrinking puzzle

does my jigsawed ghost fit in?

We did not bury him,

Wowinape. We put his head on display

like it was a piece of paleolithic pottery,

or the skeleton of an animal gone extinct.

We could not bury him,

Wowinape, because we would not admit

that we killed him. Over a century passed before we realized

how angels could watch fireworks and hear only silence,

how all they could see were their own tongues drowning

in a sea of white-hot fire.