A Paleness Then Thrown

A paleness then thrown
spreads like manic wildfire avaricious, tinning cultures
OTHER—a windfall amassed by spacial underpinning,
a construct of religious license: a mask for murder
and ransacking ample stores from the indigenous.
Colonists dismiss their brothers and trample their brain-trusts;
Unholy! Monopoles rupture annals, sequence amiss
under tragedy skies, circles of vultures persistent,
odor of rot under the surface lasts for centuries.

No more: the golden tapestry of African custom
across the continent where hominids first stood upright.
No more: the floating gardens, the moon and sun pyramids,
and the pigmented, sacred stone of the Americas.
No more: the three-sister agriculture, wigwam lodges,
canoes, or powwows as nations sundanced near buffalo.
No more: vast numbers of brown collectives, some of them named,
some cut from the margins of archives in disavowal.

Ghosts of the lost and dead haunt the blood-soaked trails of tears.
Displaced. The list is long—the havoc unforgivable.
Lamentations for the fallen under the plow of progress,
from clans to cities organized over lifetimes before
a paleness then thrown.