Stage Indian

(This sonnet first published in Grand Little Things) 

History offered her no hiding place
From where the fingers of a ghoulish God
Upon the throat of her red bloodied race
Had tried to break her neck into a nod.

Far from the grassy ghetto called a home
The merciless clichés make her their own,

Cruel and insipid. She sings broken rhyme,

Casts the die rolling like a dead man's bone.

And still the blood is dripping from a rock
In her beneath the mind's red, white and bruises.
She just had foodstamps, not a tomahawk,
Who now in shameful feathering amuses
Them. Even so. Still buffalo bend to feed
And bear in their huge hearts a raw stampede.