Lost White Men

Not many of them really,
Not considering the long,
Slow shift of population

Replacement that was the west
American genocide.
Other than Custer, who knows

Exactly how many names
Of men on the "winning" side
Came to their violent end,

Their corpses emptied of dreams
Of conquest and future farms
Heavy with blossoms in spring

Belonging to them and theirs
Deservedly for having
Exterminated heathen?

Enough of them lie scattered
About this landscape to be
A part of its tragedy.

In the middle of a burn
That turned a canyon lovely
That had been covered in scrub

Hiding the square white stone fence
Containing ten men's remains,
Eight of them whites and two Utes,

A visitor, for a while,
Until green recovery
Over the next few decades

Hides it all again, can see
From the gold-miners' ruins
At the top of the canyon,

Down the broad sweep of bleached oak
Skeletons green at ankle
To the battlefield gravesite

Of this very last skirmish
Over which people would live
How they could in these mountains,

To the farm cemetery
Filled with the graves of infants
Of the post-miner settlers,

To the contemporary grid
Of empty vacation homes
Irrigated from deep wells

On the valley floor that was
A ranch a while, a campsite,
A blank. Have mercy, my god.