________________________________________________________________Eclipse at Wounded Knee - 2017

By Dick Eiden

Dick is a poet, attorney, and political activist living in Vista, California. The poem below is a pantoum, a poem with four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines in each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines in the next and the last line of the poem is the same as the first, rules Dick says he sometimes breaks. "Eclipse at Wounded Knee" won an honorable mention in the recent Steve Kowit Memorial Contest and will be published in the San Diego Poetry Annual, coming out March 1st.

Eclipse at Wounded Knee -  2017

Small cemetery on the hill, sparse growth
chapel at one end of the mass grave
blizzard froze the bodies where they fell
limbs askew, like a piece by Picasso
 
Chapel at one end of mass grave, enclosed
in chain link, hung with fading ribbons
limbs askew like a piece by Picasso
piled into a wagon, pulled up the hill
 
Inside chain link hung with faded ribbons
we walk with heads bowed over those
piled into wagons and pulled up the hill
from where the soldiers gunned them down
 
We walk on brown dirt with heads still bowed
to the tiny museum below the hill
near where soldiers gunned them down
young woman sits with baby and coffee can
 
for donations to the museum below the hill
faded tributes to AIM and the Spirit of ‘73
the young woman sits with a coffee can
and her baby, lives there with her husband.
 
Faded tributes to AIM, the spirits of ‘73
her father, a warrior then, bought the museum
where she lives with her baby and husband
darkness on the reservation still.
 
Her father, a warrior then, bought the museum
painted long ago, coffee can for donations
darkness on the reservation still, the moon
moving slowly left across the sun.