from A Cycle of the West
But yonder, with the crow
and kiote to applaud his pomp of woe,
The last great Sioux rode down to his defeat.
[…][…] O sad it was to hear
How all the pent-up music of the year
Surged northward there the way it used to do!
In vain the catbird scolded at the Sioux;
The timid pewee queried them in vain;
Nor might they harken to the whooping crane
Nor heed the high geese calling them to come.
Unwelcome waifs of winter, drab and dumb,
Where ecstasy of sap and thrill of wing
Made shift to flaunt some color or to sing
The birth of joy, they toiled a weary way.
And giddy April sobered into May
Before they topped the summit looking down
Upon the valley of the soldier's town
At Robinson.
(from The Song of the Indian Wars [1925])
True to an empty ritual of faith
The geese came chanting as they used to do
When there was wonder yet; when, blue on blue,
The world was wider than a day in June,
And twice the northbound bison lost the moon
Trailing the summer up the Sioux domain.
What myriads now would hear the whooping crane
And join the green migration?
[…]
Among the public cottonwoods and oaks
The shrill jays coupled and the catbird screamed,
Delirious with the dream the old Earth dreamed
of ancient nuptials, ecstasies that were.
[…]
And every morning the deluded lark
Sang hallelujah to a widowed world.
(from The Song of the Messiah [1935])
Crane, Whooping
Grus americana
Notes
In the two "Indian" books of the Cycle, The Song of the Indian Wars and The Song of the Messiah, Nebraskan poet laureate Neihardt writes of the deaths of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, with a great deal of power and empathy. The two passages above involve moments in which the Lakota culture was at its nadir, and their emotional impact derives from the ironic juxtaposition of a despairing people and a natural world that would get on with the annual rebirth of spring but must be infected with the depressed human mood via the sympathetic fallacy. . . . Unless Neihardt is confusing the Whooping Crane with the Sandhill, his allusions here are already nostalgic invocations of a time past, since the former species was already rare and endangered by the early 20th century. Indeed, it's hard not to find parallels in the species' near-extinction and the fate of the Lakota, a "doomed" people for whom Neihardt insists upon writing an elegy, both in the Cycle and in Black Elk Speaks. Thankfully, both this bird and this tribal culture are making comebacks.