There are so many Gazas in our past

And they remain:

Standing Rock

Pine Ridge

Rosebud

In 1862 the Woodland Sioux

Called Dakota

Had their reservation halved

And so the game was hunted out

“Let them eat grass,” the Indian agent said

When the government beef and flour

He was to disburse

Was late in coming

That Marie Antoinette moment

Cost him his life

They found him with his mouth

Stuffed with grass

Gaza today is a premeditated fire,

The planning was meticulous and savage

Its results measurable

Count the teenaged sukkoth concertgoers

Dead in the roadway

The fires coming, in the name of justice,

Will be terrible

The fire the Dakota started

Was over a farmer’s eggs

In Meeker County Minnesota

Where my great-grandparents later homesteaded

They were Famine refugees

From County Wicklow

Intimate with hunger

But this farmer protested

Losing the eggs from his hen’s nest

He appeared with a rifle

Before he could use it

The young Sioux men butchered him

And his family

They’d been hungry

The eggs were there for the taking

Little Crow, their headman,

Resisted the calls for war

And so was called a coward

That stung

And so Little Crow led the war

Presided,  unwilling,

Over the murders of settlers

The burning of their towns

Ashen beneath their funeral pyres

Like those that darken Gaza

Terror marked the faces

Of fleeing Whites

Some spoke their fear aloud in rapid German

Determination marked the faces

Of their soldier-boys

Ready to kill Johnny Rebs 

In Virginia

They were diverted instead to the Dakota 

In their state, in Minnesota

Their disappointment was transmuted

Into fury

And made the Great Dakota War brief 

(The Gaza War will live a longer life)

Three hundred Dakota fighters were sentenced to hang

Lincoln intervened

Thirty-eight seemed a more decent number

The young men, the hungry merciless killers

Held hands and sang

When the scaffold board in Mankato

Collapsed

Arroyo Grande settler John Rice,

A soldier then, was there—

The board’s collapse

Sounded like a pistol shot—

He saw the young men dancing

In the cold midair

On this, the day after Christmas 1862

(After Wounded Knee 1890

Big Foot’s survivors

Nearly all women and children

Their bullet wounds sheated in ice

Were arranged on the floor

Of an Episcopal post chapel

Soon after Christmas

PEACE ON EARTH, GOODWILL TO MEN

The banner above them proclaimed)

The Dakota bodies were covered in blankets 

And buried in a  sandbar

Above the Minnesota River

They were soon unearthed

One became the grinning skeleton

In Dr. Mayo’s office

The following s summer

A farmer shot Little Crow

Hiding in his cornfield

Little Crow’s son went to fetch new moccasins

For his father’s long walk to the other side

But his father was gone when he returned

With the moccasins

Whose beading was exquisite

It was the Fourth

Little town boys inserted firecrackers

Into Little Crow’s nostrils

And lit them

When they grew tired of their sport

Little Crow was fed to hogs

The military tribunals had been just as profane

The only defense the accused young men had

Was their silence

A white woman intervened for one

The man who had saved her life

And her children’s lives

Interposing his body 

Between them

And his enraged brother-fighters



There was a clerical error

When warders came to free him 

They could not find the woman’s savior

“You hanged him yesterday”

A hollow voice called

From the cellbank in Mankato