These poems are part of the special section, New Poems of U.S. History, reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence selected by editors Carolivia Herron, Summer Tate, and Robert Bettmann. You can read more about the section on the Day Eight website here.
Buffalo Bill
After E.E. Cummings
“In eighteen months, I killed four thousand two hundred and eighty buffaloes.”
⎯Buffalo Bill, upon winning a contest to feed railroad workers
Bill, my blue-eyed boy, you knew
those hairy humpbacks, gentle beasts:
you called the bison ‘buffaloes,’
then stole the name you gave them.
they could be a flash flood!
how they pawed sod, Alberta to Texas.
how they thundered, untethered and free,
shaking the ground beneath your feet.
you watched natives hunt in buffalo robes.
saw them dance in those very same clothes.
sat with them as they ate the meat, carved the bones.
you knew they filled their lives with buffalos.
from belching, metal trains, you hunters came
clackity-clack along railroad tracks;
the rifle bursts, crack, crack, crack.
then miners came to stake their claims;
ranchers brought cattle and all their chattel;
farmers turned the ground upside down.
after all the disagreements,
broken treaties and barbarous laws;
after all your sideshows and spectacles,
all the shoot, loot and disrepute,
the only real buffalo left is you, Bill.
Social Dis-ease & Our Body Politic
a culture as putrid as any in a petri dish:
alternative facts, jabberwocky and lies;
curiosities and conspiracies, real and imagined;
a tragic magic that rival wizards and witches pitch,
conjuring up our founding fathers
and featuring our floundering children.
without treatment, this hideous dis-ease spreads,
intensifies the way, let’s say, syphilis comes and goes,
then returns: first a sore, a firm chancre, round,
painless, near where the disease first enters,
followed by a clearing and latency. later—weeks,
months, years—brown and red rashes bloom,
cover the entire body with an intense itch,
one that worsens at the extremities.
lastly, failure of mind over muscle:
at times this looks like dementia;
other times, it appears as paralysis.
either way, every organ of the body dies.
John M. Davis currently lives in Visalia, California. His poetry has
appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Comstock Review,
The West Trade Review, Gyroscope Review, The Ekphrastic Review
(Canada), Constellations and Reunion: The Dallas Review. “The Mojave”,
his most recent chapbook, was published by the Dallas Community Poets.
Featured image Jack Dykinga, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
