Apocalypse

[billy]

it reads like a nice piece of informative prose. i think it would be enhanced with four or five strong images. at present it's more story than poem. if you can add the metaphors/similes you'll have a much more interesting piece. poem-wise.

It was routine practice for native Americans to burn the New England forests. The fire cleared the underbrush. English settlers expanding west, in the early days, could ride horses at full gallop through the woods. But the first English to travel west from the colonies weren't men. They were disease. Smallpox annihilated many tribes, leaving desolated, pristine acres behind.  

A young family traveling out into the wilderness, therefore, would have been greeted with open fields, populated by troves of animals, their numbers unchecked by hunters who now, in strange poses, had wasted into skeletons, which could be found grouped in lifeless encampments, prone in empty fields, contorted and hunched alone against a tall tree in a New England cathedral forest, where a child might accidentally find them, and perhaps leave breathless and horrified, holding strange jewelry, or a knife, or a bone, wondering how to keep it secret, or what sin they may have done in the eyes of their violent, reckless Christ.