The Last Buffalo Poem by Sonny Rainshine

The last buffalo died quietly in the snow
where he had fallen against a solitary scrub oak,
one of dozens of swelling mounds, white graves.

That night the wind blustered and swept
a top layer of the snow from the bison’s
frozen crypt, leaving his head exposed.

His eyes, capturing the glint of the post-blizzard moon,
gazed upward, gazed across the Great Plains,
as if to say to them: I’ll return again to graze

in meadows that rustle in the wind and sun,
and slake my thirst in the streamlets and ponds,
sequestered there among my fellow beasts.

The moon then vanished behind a cloud,
the wind gathered up the snowy shroud,
and the last buffalo dreamed of tall grasses.