Without Title

for my Father who lived without ceremony

Poem by Diane Glancy

It’s hard to know without the buffalo,

the shaman, the arrow,

but my father went out each day to hunt

as though he had them.

5 He worked in the stockyards.

All his life he brought us meat.

No one marked his first kill,

no one sang his buffalo song.

Without a vision he had migrated to the city

10 and went to work in the packing house.

When he brought home his horns and hides

my mother said

get rid of them.

I remember the animal tracks of his car

15 out the drive in the snow and mud,

the aerial on his old car waving

like a bow string.

I remember the silence of his lost power,

the red buffalo painted on his chest.

20 Oh, I couldn’t see it

but it was there, and in the night I heard

his buffalo grunts like a snore.


Directions: On page 38 of your HMH books, co