Rousseau’s brave savages
had circled her covered wagon,
leaving vestiges
of life that could have been:
dreams of a promised land,
a son and rag-doll daughter,
a scalped Scottish husband,
and not a drop of water.
Raping her on the prairie
from nightfall to red dawn,
they did not call her “Mary, ”
but “whore of the Cheyenne.”
They tethered her with rope,
taught her new kinds of pain,
her only living hope:
the fury of white men.
Years later she would watch
the braves flee cannon shot,
the chief squeal like a wretch,
the buffalo meat rot.
Three blows with a hatchet
would prove her only saviour,
a scalped head and a facelift.
And no tears could raise her.
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