Each year, the placard tells us,
Ho-Chunk Indians
burned this prairie to ash,
rooting out invasive species –
the buckthorn and the honeysuckle,
so eager to conquer
and upend precarious order.
Still, when settlers came,
with their muskets, beaver traps, plagued blankets,
larceny disguised as
gratitude
no cleansing burn laid clean the land
no prairie fires
released the seeds of a new spring
and the ancestors’ ghosts wept.
Today, trudging up sage-drab
hillside snaked by waterways,
lined in desiccated grasses,
looking down on fields of
oxtail, purple coneflower, silky aster
cleaving mightily to the
embattled substrate,
clamoring their defiance
in gaudy hues,
I am thinking of how
the Ho-Chunk know a secret:
that to destroy something so
very precious to you,
some part of what you call home,
is to let it return to you
filled only with
the essence of all
it was ever meant to be,
black and bare,
seeded
and ready for spring.
© 2019 R.B. Simon
First published in the January 2021 Issue of Cutleaf Literary Journal.
