Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, EARLY AMERICAN, by JANE MILLER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

EARLY AMERICAN, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: From brazil to miami to a roadside motel to a super billboard
Last Line: The pale hands of our brothers upon us
Subject(s): Billboards; Native Americans; Popular Culture - United States; United States; Indians Of America; American Indians; Indians Of South America; America


From Brazil to Miami to a roadside motel to a super billboard
above Vegas's Stardust you are in vast spaces
at high speeds all watt & animation
your enormous corpse must be seen
as a moving sequence
inflected toward the freeway
received by approaching traffic from a greater distance for a longer
time & may it be known
you take the sign away & there is no place
this being your civic duty to inform us
we ought to have put together an allegiance of tribes
& swept down on the fort & spilled the Christians
off the continent's edge

We pass through town toward a rendezvous
in a hard shell with a child's face
eyes closed straining martyr-like
toward pleasure out of reach
we're in a dying year
no one can take that from us
you leave us soon enough
an autumn to receive gifts
to break the heart
a great blue heron & white goose
to you we are more savage
than the dead enjoying a triumph
of mists at dawn & dusk
the pale hands of our brothers upon us





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