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God's drum, and other cycles from Indian lore cover

God's drum, and other cycles from Indian lore

Chapter 13: THE CITIES OF WHITE MEN
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About This Book

A sequence of poems evokes dawn through dusk, prairie winds and dust, ritual dances and spirit songs, and mythic reckonings framed as a red apocalypse. Later cycles portray terraced Pueblo landscapes, potters, corn maidens, and ruined pueblos, while final pieces invoke Aztec gods and cosmology. The language is lyrical and imagistic, alternating intimate observation of natural life with ceremonially inflected reflections on death, renewal, and the drumlike rhythms of the earth.

THE CITIES OF WHITE MEN

Those men build many houses:
They dig the earth, and they build;
They cut down the trees, and they build;
They work always—building.
From the elevation of the mountain-side
I behold the clouds:
The clouds build many beautiful houses in the sky:
They build, and they tear down;
They build, and they dissolve....
The cities of white men,
They are not beautiful, like the cloud cities;
They are not vast, like the cloud cities....
A wind-swept teepee
Is all the house I own....