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
A Work in Progress 