Medicine Brute

Image borrowed from Bing

Medicine Brute

The albino made the ground tremble
and the air crackle as he tore open
the skies and fed upon the stars.

He was the Ivory Horn,
the snow bull monarch,
the one whispered about and sang of--
the great dream, salvation, sustenance,
and legend as his humped multitudes
smothered the hills like a dun prairie sea
touching both horizons,

Until yesterday when he heard
the first shrill blast of the steam whistle
atop something nightmare huge
pounding the plains without mercy,
at first wailing far off like something lost
until it found its way to them, transporting
leather-fringed men who carried thunder
in their hands and directed lightning
to strike his herd with hellish tongues,
spitting death as bullets.

Great hoary horned herds of heaven,
he witnessed his loved ones stagger,
crashing to earth, brothers onto mothers,
fathers onto sons, a million million
hearts bursting, their death bawl rising
like terrible red dust, splashing blood
into wet whirlwinds, drenching the grass
with their dying breath, their entrails
dragging behind them, gut-shot into glue.

He watched it end as the living ocean
became carrion, the long knives carved,
the vultures pecked, with the towering stench
of rotting meat clogging the nostrils of the night,
that fell without silence while the blood birds
fought and the calves cried injustice.

The dawn arrived with bison blood soaked
deep into the sun, still steaming, kissing
the cold with the heat from their livers.
He stood until he could watch no more,
until his pink eyes clouded, until his chest
quit heaving, hearing hundreds of locomotives
approaching he turned away from them
and fled back into the clouds.

Glenn Buttkus

June 2011

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