Without Title by Diane Glancy

Without Title

   for my Father who lived without ceremony

by Diane Glancy

(published in her 1990 book, Iron Woman, New Rivers Press)

It’s hard you know without the buffalo,

the shaman, the arrow,

but my father went out each day to hunt

as though he had them.

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

and went to work in the packing house.

When he brought home his horns ...