Bones

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2003 by Henson, Stuart

a hundred years ago there were forty million drifting and jostling across the prairie

now there are bones scattered like the litter of some giants' picnic

or piled in cairns on the killing-fields of the Sioux, the Metis, the Quablonut

the white bones bleached by the seasons clattering into a gunnysack

for sweetness refined for sugar in a bone china cup

and the last buffalo did he kneel down here in the grass in Starbuck, Manitoba

or did he simply wander north over a border into the whiteness of oblivion?

A selection of STUART HEN SON's poems appears in the Oxford Poets 2002 anthology (Carcanet Press, U.K.) ....