OLD AMERICA IN ANTIC SHROUD

The Native Americans

This place was a haven of cooing birds that celebrate in the trees 

That dance and flutter with the leaves and flowers in the wind on summer evenings.

Bonfires revealed the copper figures and faces of half-clad Cherokee children

And women in camps of extended families celebrating the harvests of corn and squash and beans

With roasted deer meats, their husbands had killed.

My grandparents crossed the waters in slanted boats of logs to till this land,

And here we lived in peace with the Iroquois and the Sioux

Until the ships that carried people with cotton skin and yellow silky hair landed on our shores,

Eyes as green and blue as the oceans on sunny days.

They offered them mats to sleep, 

water to bath, wild turkeys and pig meats 

And deers and bears and glasses of beers brewed from barley and squash 

As their culture demand.

But they infect them with diseases to reciprocate their kind gestures.

And today the history books read 'Columbus discovered America.'

For how do you discover an entire civilization

Of people and cultures that long existed

Like an object of thesis in labs and specimens of scientific experiments?

Annihilate an entire race for fields and parcels of lands

From where skyscrapers now tower to the sky 

And industrial emitted gas now suffocates the earth.

Murder women and children along with their fathers and mothers,

brothers and sister and cousins

Then replace them with your kin from Ireland and Scotland and Wales. 

Sweep their history under the carpets, 

Call them 'Barbaric savages'

And tell the world the sweet tales of great America through distorted history 

of heroes with the whitest of skin.

Let's talk about Elon Musk and Tesla,

Let's talk of NASA and Nebula, 

Of Star Wars and Mars,

Let's talk about Goldman Sach and Nike

Not the hungry children deprived of education in Congo

Subjected to child labour in the mines to make your Forbes favourite billionaires. 

Let's talk about Abe Lincoln and sing songs of praises to Bill Gates

Let's not talk about how the prisons were built for the remnant of the Negroes, not on death row

Or this real America the great,

This America built on the blood and tears of the oppressed,

This America whose foundations were built on the buried bones of the Indians.

But let's build a wall to block the Mexicans out

They canvass with Trump's as they sing songs of praises

To Donald the modern Christ.

Let's bar the people more American than the Irish-men

Who only left a tree of memory of scars from infected wounds

Laid by whips and blood on the plantations 

Where cotton was grown by grumblings and sorrows.

Somehow, they need more protection from threatening foreigners.

I mean the foreigners whose only nativity is a biased constitution that protects them

Now have the conscience to call an American a stranger.

Are they more scared of hats and shirts on horses 

and farms of tobacco

More than smallpox on the skin of the Indians?

Or the chains from neck to wrist to ankle of the West Africans that landed from slave ships?

©Drey Hommies 2021

AUTHOR'S BIO

The Author of this mind blowing Historical poem has chosen to remain anonymous.