apache tears
Jason Hackett
The tears of Apache wives
wept deep into the mountainside,
Plenty enough to fill
the white boys’ tin buckets –
plunk, plunk, plunk.
Hold a stone teardrop in your palm
and you never have to weep again,
It does all the weeping for you,
legend has it.
Real bones at the base of the cliff,
warriors too proud to die indignantly,
Now forgotten relics picked over
in the afterlife,
Unnamed gravestones of shadowy translucence
caught between eye and sun,
Incur happiness in the innocence
of not knowing.
The tears’ only inclusions,
mourning, imperfections
Rock tumblers and history books
can easily spin a shine on –
plunk, plunk, plunk.