This is an original poem which I have written. It is an imagined glimpse into the lives of prehistoric steppe bison, as well as their North American descendants, and their relation to humans. Images are creative commons licensed from Wikimedia Commons.
Long before those who
hunted us
abandoned
starlit consecrations they had
gathered in stone,
to depart
with the assurances
of spring's communal optimism,
clothed in newly tanned hides
under a raptor's sky,
wrapped in shadowed greens,
wayfaring bands
steeped in glaciated mountain reaches
bargained with spirits
at the meeting point
between land and storm,
to pursue us
from this place of our own
Siberian ancestry,
to tether
unfamiliar lands to feet,
to bear the sharp points
of flint, fluted fragments of home
hafted to lengths of wood
and secured with a morning
blessing
that would sink blood
into the tundra's frosty textures.
Their fire pits spoke of
spears that would locate the spaces
between our ribs
as we migrated through northern forests,
solemnly intoning
our transitory stay in the sedges
upon which we fed.
Though we had lost many
to the sleepless hunger
of dire wolf and cave lion,
we were strong
and the Earth
breathed promises
into the sun flooded range lands
where we raised our children.
At the tip of sharpened stone
we had come to feed them,
to lend them our life
in winter's sparkling cradle.
Our dreams were entwined with theirs, lingering
in fissures of bone, and there were
moments of waking
into the exhalations
of reemerging grasses,
when the softening soil that became us,
that birthed us,
that devoured us,
was the refrain of our summer song.
We did not foresee the coming
accretions of the great horse herds,
wagon trains, railway rifles, and telegraph wire,
the trading posts that would one day procure
the skins of our distant offspring
to become the leather drive belts
of industry’s relentless spin.
Nor did we anticipate
miles of skeleton
collected by the dwellers of silent grasslands,
piled in bleaching anticipation of boxcars,
pounded into phosphoric remedies for
depleted, postbellum cotton fields.
Perhaps in those moments between sleep and waking
the old ones among us did glimpse
a future of deep prairie skull piles
ripped from our southern descendants,
a massacre pinned as progress in a photographer‘s eyes,
but our fears then were constrained
by the immediacy of teeth,
hunting spears,
and the contempt of cold and drought,
time's familiar harassments,
eased by the effacing sound of a million hooves,
that carried away the fallen
upon our collective thunder.
At one time, tens of millions of American bison, modern descendants of the prehistoric bison, roamed freely throughout North America, all the way to the eastern seaboard of the United States. Over the course of a few centuries, particularly in the 1800's, the American bison were hunted nearly to extinction, with only a few hundred remaining in the late 19th century, primarily as a consequence of the pressures brought about by the commercial operations of European settlers.