Dead in Bloody Snow

Meridel LeSueur

I am an Indian woman
Witness to my earth
Witness for my people.
I am the nocturnal door,
The hidden cave of your sorrow,
Like you hidden deep in furrow
and dung
of the charnel mound,
I heard the craven passing of the
white soldiers
And saw them shoot at Wounded Knee
upon the sleeping village,
And ran with the guns at my back
Until we froze in our blood on the snow

I speak from old portages
Where they pursued and shot into the river crossing
All the grandmothers of Black Hawk.
I speak from the smoke of grief,
from the broken stone,
And cry with the women crying from the marsh
Trail and tears of drouthed women,
O bitter barren!
O barren bitter!
I run, homeless.
I arrive
in the gun sight,
beside the white square houses
of abundance.
My people starve
In the time of the bitter moon.
I hear my ghostly people crying
A hey a hey a hey.

Rising from our dusty dead the sweet grass,
The skull marking the place of loss and flight.
I sing holding my severed head,
to my dismembered child,
A people's dream that died in bloody snow.

Meridel LeSueur defines herself as "a 76-year-old Midwestern writer," something of an understatement since she has published 12 books and innumerable stories, articles and poems. "Dead in Bloody Snow" is reprinted from Rites of Ancient Ripening (Vanilla Press, Minneapolis, 1975) in which she says, "Slogan for 76: Survival is a form of resistance."