The Last Libation
 
Jim Town, across the county line
Where many a poor Cheyenne
Emptied his dim future
In the short, sotted glass;
 
Drinking again, drinking through time
 
Nothing new of this watery fire,
The forked-tongue libation
Passed from the pallid men
Down to generations of the lost,
 
To those hunched at the rail-
Descendants of red men who
Counted coup with shining valor-
But these instead pour out their ‘souled’
 
Drinking again, drinking for 'ail'
 
Lives to Chief Bacchus of the bottle;
Restricted to behind the dark bars,
They shuffle the time worn cards,
Then slump, no longer ruling the plains.
 
But the Rez’s young girl, his cousin,
Only 12, copper-templed and kind,
With glorious raven hair, now
In the gathering Montana dusk
 
Drinking again, drinking  young down
 
Tips on the dirt walk, sour breathed,
Staggers on their ‘warn’ path
Through Lame Deer town
And passes down, then gone.
 
Says another tribe’s brave,
A leader in translation,
My heart is sick…
 
I will drink no more forever.
 
 --Dan Wilcox
​
First pub. in Sentinel Poetry, United Kingdom, 
and in The Copperfield Review, and in the book 
of published poems, Psalms, Yawps, and Howls

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