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INDIAN WOMAN Linnie M. Findlay Ephraim, Utah Non-Professional Division First Place Poetry We call this "Witches Knoll," great silent mount Of earth, heaped over burial grounds, where once you lived When all your tribe was gone. Why were you left alone to guard this spot? Did you desire to stay behind and watch them go? Were all your closest tribesmen buried here? How did you live? Did Sego Lily roots supply your food? (They, too, are gone from land where once they grew.) Or did you learn to shoot, to hunt for meat With bow and arrow as the warrior had? If this brown earth could talk and tell us tales Of all who'd lived before our journey here. What would we learn of you, lone resident of Sad abode, who lived on burial grounds? (And what of those who lived before you came? How many ages past has mankind made His home among these hills, how many races come And gone and left no evidence?) Some chips of flint, a broken grinding mill, And stone you used to grind your meal; A fragment of a painted bowl you'd made; These are the silent teachers, all that's left On land, once rich with heads of stone Your tribe had made to kill the startled deer Or stop the leaping rabbit or the bird, To feed the hungry stomachs of a horde Of brown skinned people, browner still As wind and sun and winter's cold Each burst their violent elements on your heads. (And when our people came--We call them pioneers-- To make a home for us among these hills, Those arrows, made to get your food Mere used for tools of war, and so you fought -31- |
