PHOTO PROMPT © C.E. Ayr
Verdant land of plenty
Rivers of buffalo
Where one serves many
Rivers, falls, streams
Being where they will
Fish jump, living dreams
Nomadic tribes
Travel with herds, seasons
Balance earth and sky
Invaders from across
Where no canoe has been
Stragglers tossed
Invasive species
Spreading white disease
Unbottled genies
Mountains of buffalo bones
Dammed rivers
Shrunk reserved homes
Stealing children
Stripped in “schools”
Things, evil-bidden
Commemorate damages
With simple, “Thanks
For everything, savages!”
Rochelle’s “story” “inspired” my poem. I’m thankful for all good things in my world right now, but I must acknowledge the shoulders of evil that went before. My sorrow goes deep for their victims.
Rochelle Wisoff-Fields is the gracious host of Friday Fictioneers.
Tao Talk 
And of course, which ones were the “savages”?
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EXACTLY. Thank you for getting it.
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Dear Lisa,
Simply stunning. The perfect reminder of what this ‘holiday’ cost the First Nations.
Shalom and happy harvest feast,
Rochelle
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Rochelle, thank you and wishing you a happy harvest feast also.
Shalom,
Lisa
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I enjoyed this poem very much.,
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Thank you, Michael.
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Very touching poem.
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Thank you, Sadje.
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You’re welcome 😉
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I love that both you and Bear jumped on Rochelle’s bandwagon. This was wonderful, Lisa. Well done.
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Thank you, Dale.
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Beautifully done!
Susan A Eames at
Travel, Fiction and Photos
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Thanks, Susan.
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Nice poem. We all want to have things that we don’t have.
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Thank you, Abhijit, true.
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A timely reminder of went before. Excellent.
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Thank you, Keith.
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It’s good to remember what the greed of our forebears did to others (for us in the UK, it’s mostly the way we profited from our empire, especially India). Of course, we continue to benefit, and the oppressed continue to suffer. Should we make reparation, and if so, how? And what should we be doing about current foreign policy that profits from the slaughter in Yemen and Syria, and formerly in Iraq? When I think of the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who perished in the Iraq war, I’m horrified.
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Thank you for reading and for your thoughtful comments, Penny.
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A hard and truthful twist. I loved imagining the river of buffalo.
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Thank you for reading and your thoughtful comment.
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Great poem, says it all in short,snappy verses.
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Thanks, Dr. Ali!
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it’s the cycle of life, isn’t it? 🙂
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It truly does seem to be a cycle of human behavior, which isn’t saying much for us as a species.
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May we never forget what happened. Powerful writing, Li.
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Thank you, Magarisa.
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You’re welcome, Li.
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Savages… what an interesting thing… I think we know nothing about mirrors.
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It’s a toxic irony to be sure 😦
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Great poem!
In school, they made it seem like the pilgrims were welcomed and Thanksgiving was a celebration of the two peoples working together. They also taught us Columbus discovered America like there weren’t already people here.
As I posted on Rochelle’s page, I’ve long called Thanksgiving the celebration of the molestation and decimation of the original people of this nation.
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So much of this went on — and is going on — in South America as well. I just watched a 2015 movie, Embrace of the Serpent, directed by Ciro Guerra, about white men traveling through the Amazonian forest and it shows the insidious evil they bring with them.
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I think it’s wrong to specifically blame white men. Conquering and colonizing has been happening since the dawn of humanity. A large chunk of the western United States was taken from the Indigenous people by the Spanish who were driven out by Mexico before the US-Mexican War defined our current boundaries. The Aztecs did their share of conquering before the Spanish wiped them out. And those are just my ancestors, Spanish, English, Mexican, Aztec… It’s a case of a more technologically or militarily advanced civilization taking from a less advanced. “We have guns. You don’t. This is our land, now.” It’s the destructive, greedy nature of humanity that’s evil.
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Latino and Spanish fit into the “white” category. Your idea of advanced civilization and mine are different. Technology and military type societies may be more brutish and blustery but they are far from advanced, unless you mean advanced towards total annihilation of everything that lives on planet earth. Institutionalized exploitation is evil, that “destructive, greedy nature of humanity.”
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That’s a pretty broad definition of white. My point is that greed and destructive tendencies are universal throughout humanity. Our need to label, categorize, and group ourselves only makes that worse.
I didn’t say a more advanced civilization. I said more technologically and militarily advanced. I would consider a peaceful civilization more evolved, utopian even. That’s where I want to live. I want to live in Star Trek. A society that focused on the advancement and the betterment of humanity instead of weaponry and destruction could achieve unimaginably more. Humanity as a species has a lot of growing, maturing, evolving to do.
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My definition of white is based on boxes that get checked for every form out there that cares to include/exclude/statistically record humans by such categories. Agreed that “us” vs. “them” has been used for leverage to commit evil for a very long time.
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Nicely done! I liked it a lot! ❤
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Thank you.
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