11-26-2023, 10:49 PM
Texas sinned.
I can’t tell you where
or when.
Might have happened when the Spanish were here.
But for sure it’s damned
and reaches out greedily
for the horsemen of climate change,
oil, guns and God,
it's true face lost in history.
Mostly the decades when my parents
were young marrieds, that I only know
through photographs. And the before that,
when Texas was a territory,
just broken hill country and plains and forest,
but plenty of Comanche.
Two boys went looking for a lost cow near Lampasas
and one was cornered by Comanche.
They told him to run and filled him with arrows
for fun. This was in 1872.
Lots of printed legends to simmer in when you know
no better than a child, and learn to read
in the paperback blaze of the 1960s
from Tolkien’s Middle Earth
to pulp fiction masters like Robert E. Howard
who gave us Conan the Barbarian
from out of the red hills an oil company rush
in the 1920s-1930s in Cross Plains
till he blew out his brains in 36.
But Texas has sinned
and simultaneously lost whatever
made it Texas. Now it’s a plate of armor
sewn to the shoulder of a raging giant.
I can’t tell you where
or when.
Might have happened when the Spanish were here.
But for sure it’s damned
and reaches out greedily
for the horsemen of climate change,
oil, guns and God,
it's true face lost in history.
Mostly the decades when my parents
were young marrieds, that I only know
through photographs. And the before that,
when Texas was a territory,
just broken hill country and plains and forest,
but plenty of Comanche.
Two boys went looking for a lost cow near Lampasas
and one was cornered by Comanche.
They told him to run and filled him with arrows
for fun. This was in 1872.
Lots of printed legends to simmer in when you know
no better than a child, and learn to read
in the paperback blaze of the 1960s
from Tolkien’s Middle Earth
to pulp fiction masters like Robert E. Howard
who gave us Conan the Barbarian
from out of the red hills an oil company rush
in the 1920s-1930s in Cross Plains
till he blew out his brains in 36.
But Texas has sinned
and simultaneously lost whatever
made it Texas. Now it’s a plate of armor
sewn to the shoulder of a raging giant.