A Visit To Fort Sumner

Fort Sumner--I signed up for a "This Week In Peace" calendar to be emailed to me every Monday through a link in Democracy For New Mexico. Later this week in 1884 marked the beginning of the forced walk and encampment of the Navajo and some Apaches at Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner. Here is a poem I wrote about it after I visited it some 20 years ago.

TWO TINTYPES: AN INTERPRETIVE TOUR OF FORT SUMNER STATE MONUMENT, EASTERN NEW MEXICO

1. a smart fence
of soldiers:
blurred Apaches
making adobes
for the Officers' Quarters

Nothing marks the route the Apaches used
when they finally crept away: the dark
beginning to a hundred stories.

And nomonument to the Navajo either--
Manuelito pleading, through the ten-year-old
boy who had learned some English,
with the Peace Commission from Washington:
five years of rationed famine.

And where are the graves of the three thousand
who died here waiting for an answer?
No tintype? No marker? No plaque?

2. distant Navajos
standing in blankets
before empty fields:
the earth rises
in clouds of cutworms and gray dust.