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the clouds billow up above their evening pillars
no
falls romance awash in the memory of a passing dream
you cannot go to where your eyes are lifted
your body is too newly old to risk a tumble
and becomes too tall for itself
wandering away into the closing of a spectacle
striding on silver stilts
the susurrating trees announce your fall
the air withdraws its give
enough is more than we can hold
grandiosity roars between our empty feet
and above our bilious empty heights
the whip cracks within us
to touch for but an instant
the ground below our dream
we roar with recognition
and shed ourselves in a flood of lightless tears
… in the summer of 1890 the Sioux began dancing. The slow, shuffling circle dance was foreign to them, but they made it more dramatic by placing a dead cottonwood tree in the center to be hung with offerings. The cottonwood, the only tall tree of the Plains, was a symbol of life, ever renewed. Then one of their number began making ghost dance shirts - long garments of white sheeting decorated with symbols in red and with eagle feathers at the elbows. Wowoka had a garment of that sort, which he has said would turn away any bullet, though he averred that no fighting would be necessary. Still, more and more men and women wore the white garment. And more and more fell unconscious during the dance, which might last five days and nights without stopping. The dreamers recovered to tell how they met the approaching dead and all sang:
The whole world of the dead is returning, returning.
Our nation is coming, is coming.
The spotted eagle brought us the message,
Bearing the Father’s word -
The word and the wish of the Father.
Over the glad new earth they are coming,
Our dead come driving the elk and the deer.
See them hurrying the herds of the buffalo!
This the Father has promised,
This the Father has given.
from Red Man’s Religion Ruth M. Underhill