1492.
The fateful year.
The Santa Maria carried more than just passengers;
an iniquity was welcomed on board
and disembarked on gentle shores to wreak havoc.

A rank stench followed man’s expanding map.
It was Death.
A bounty owed wherever man encroached.

The superior race obediently accepted the task set before him:
to carry out unnecessary and unbounded carnage.

Even the trees shuddered,
catching sight of Manifest destruction, not Destiny.
Alas, they could not pull up their roots to run.
And neither could their keepers.
Whose sharp-tipped spears were no match for barreling bullets.
Whose intolerably savage ways were cause for eradication.

The final verdict of the White Man's Justice, based on
nothing less than skin color, difference of beliefs, and sheer ignorance.

Wars raged on,
and treaties were written in vanishing ink.
Blankets shrouded shoulders and warriors fell like flies.
Struck down by an invisible enemy.
One unlike any they had ever seen before.

As easy as slipping rugs out from underneath,
homes were wrestled from weakening grips.
Pushed, further and further
To catch the setting sun as it ran off the edge of the world.
To make room.
And now, the mighty Native sits, corralled into a poverty-stricken reservation.
Once great agglomerate of nations
reduced to filling the poorest pockets of this FREE country.

True reparations have yet to be made.
Perhaps never to be made.

A pale horse gallops forward, unrelenting.
While a red eagle finds its wings eternally clipped.