Sunday, February 3, 2013

The Ambiguities of Terror

from Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell 
In his book [My Life on the Plains] Custer reproduced a telegram from [General] Sherman to [President] Grant, dated one week after the slaughter, which says in part: "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children. Nothing less will reach the root of the case." If one word of this extraordinary telegram is altered it reads like a message from Eichmann to Hitler.
"The slaughter" to which Connell refers is the 1866 incident in which a band of Oglala Sioux massacred eighty soldiers, under the command of an idiot named Captain William Fetterman, who disobeyed orders, marched his men onto Sioux-controlled land (where he was distinctly told not to go), decided to chase down a few Indians, and was lured into an Oglala trap. My poem about the incident arose from reading the eyewitness accounts of the troopers who were sent to clean up the battlefield. I know I've posted it here before, but I'll give it to you again.




The Fate of Captain Fetterman’s Command

            1866

At first light we saw our enemies
on the bluff
silver flashing in their hair

a glory of sun as they rode away laden
with tunics saddles boots arrows
still piercing the cracked boots

piercing our silent comrades
and just visible in the dawn
we saw wolves and coyotes

skulking along the verge
crows buzzards eagles circling
the sun-spattered meadow

but not one white body was disturbed
for we hear that salt permeates
the whole system of our race

which protects us from the wild
to some degree but it was strange
that nothing had eaten the horses either

except for flies which swarmed in thick
like the stench
all day we waited

till the doctor finished his report then
they told us to pack our friends
into the ammunition wagons

this was our job they said to retch
to stumble into the field to grasp
at wrists at ankles dissolving to pulp

under our grip to vomit to weep
to stare at masks pounded bloody with stones
bloated crawling with flies who were they

this was our job but we could not sort
cavalry from infantry all stripped
naked slashed skulls crushed

with war clubs ears noses legs
hacked off and some had
crosses cut on their breasts

faces to the sky
we walked on their hearts
but did not know it in the high grass

This poem will appear within an essay that is forthcoming in the Sewanee Review, a piece that is ostensibly about William Blake but deals more particularly with the way in which poets risk not only their readership but their own aesthetic values for the sake of an unquenchable, insoluble moral distress.

The Fetterman incident continues to haunt me. It seems emblematic of the way in which the intense personal nature of fear can so easily obscure the far larger horrors of genocide--and yet the individual's fear and terror remain entirely recognizable and compelling. So much slaughter continues to arise from these pockets of horror and desperation.

1 comment:

Maureen said...

Your poem is marvelous; those last two lines especially grip.

I hope to have the opportunity to read the essay. It would seem to be particularly pertinent now (I'm thinking, for example, of responses to "Zero Dark Thirty", and the horror that Syria is still).