International Hour of Prayer for the Yellowstone Buffalo Herd

Noon, March 6, 1997 From morning’s mouth the bones emerge, a prayer is whispered over rounded horns; the prairie is beyond the quivering hump and holy smoke sparkles released in the breath. Braided sweetgrass, be about their hooves; although the grip of hunger lies heavy on the land, let endless native grasses grow among the yellow stones and between the stars. Even if only one man had begun to sing, actually it was thousands, She who came to Wisconsin farmers and transformed their lives, She who brought her blessing in the form of being newborn, She whom they named the Miracle, White Buffalo Calf Maiden must return amid the fast firing of bullets, along the most perilous of paths. Rock stars, millionaires, they all offered millions of dollars to struggling white farmers but she had begun her transformation and her prophecy by touching them and they came to understand if not the actual words to the prayers at least the reverence, the need to protect, to keep the doors open. Like it was a hundred years ago bounties are gathered from death; trains, buses, cars, planes carry the segmented body of the terrible worm across the land and the screams of the hunted split the sun awake. It is time to restore the stolen beads and shards, the bones and knives to every grave. And the graves are graves no longer but wombs; the bounties burn their hands and bones come flowing from museum shelves to dance in the rippling grass, rebuilding lungs, starting hearts. There must be a hundred men and a hundred men’s worth of heartlessness; wished they could find Indians to kill but now that is illegal so they make up some excuse to raise their rifles and take aim, not hearing the rumble of buffalo prayer, not feeling tomorrow tremble or the prophecy of Miracle, and smile as they see the legs give way, the horns gouge open the prairie ground, Earth betrayed again.