I Stared at the printed words
hazed, blurred, they became grey.
I trailed down the page
to a picture shouting what I read

I thought about my people
up North—
far from here.
My land, the hot dry basin,
the pine on the mountain ranges
and the snowcapped peaks.

I thought of the killing word:
Civilization.
The steel buildings stabbing the earth,
stabbing old religions
now buried on the hilltop,
to have their tears drip black
from Industry’s ash clouds.

I thought of the unseen tears
in eyes watching our valley
gashed by plows,
proud trees uprooted, dragged aside,
giving way to smothering tar roads.
And river veins pumped away
never knowing the path to the Columbia River.

I glanced at the blurring printed words
and felt an ancient anger swell,
bubble like a volcano in birth,
anger blackening the printed words
about your land being only a swamp
useless to Civilization.

I saw in a flash
the unknowing eyes of the Everglades—
alligators, egrets, water turkeys, ibises,
Animals I’ve never seen, never known
except from sadness that their fate lies
in printed words.

The words about the Everglades—
moist, mysterious, very much a land—
useless.
Words forgetting the animal people,
the Seminole, the Miccosukie,
who are standing in the way of the thing called
Civilization.