The rich
deep soil that once grew wheat and corn as tall at the height of an
average man’s head, and the thick vine
like interlocking foliage of the Minnesota woods of the north, once impossible
to penetrate where bear and deer and creek and wolves
and small beasts familiar to men, to
name a few, roamed:
Foe
and predecessor to the white man of long ago, — where the Cayuga (the Iroquois)
and the
Chippewa, peered through its thick
leafage, and over its bluffs onto the Mississippi: came a tide of tall, broad,
roaring hot whisky breathe men, Bible
toting, Protestant and Catholic, mostly Anglo-Saxons; not as
brothers, but rather near rivals, ready
to brawl.
Dragging
their wives and children and in-laws across an ocean from a land called Europe
to face the native tomahawks—
And
at the same time cutting up an acre here and there, and now everywhere in the
big Minnesota wilderness!
Gullible
as an elephant running wild in the city of London…, unaware of its seasonal
hazards—they came to stay.
Thus
they changed the Minnesota terrain forevermore!
Those
days of course, now long gone—
Yesterday’s
days!
Days
my grandfather could have said, lived its finality!
Legends
now.
Steamboats
that once were carriers of produce, and other goods, city to city along the
Mississippi now taken over by: trains, trucks and planes: are but tourist rides
down the river…
And
the brave and hawking eyeing, Ojibwa, have left their tents on reservations,
and built casinos, with acres of ‘one-arm bandits’.
Thus,
all that is left of those far-off days, are scenes and portraits, on walls, at
the State Capital, in St. Paul.
No: 4476 (7-18-2014/Poetic Prose
