- a Native American settlement near Lafayette, Indiana
The Prophet made the sun stop in Ohio
and Tecumseh swept up the new followers
for their town at the crook between
the Tippecanoe and Wabash.
One brother a seer, the other a unifier.
What the two brothers wrought,
a town for the believers and organizers,
brought a European vision.
The one-eyed Prophet, a born-again drunk,
preached against accommodating the whites
as a Good Indian, and his brother orated
the same to any who would listen.
Had the Prophet been a warrior, not a seer,
Harrison would have been Custer
before Custer was Custer at the Little Big Horn,
ambushed in the Tippecanoe swamps.
But the Prophet ended Tecumseh’s dream
the little brother with the voice of gods,
trying to help—dead bodies and village burned,
flooded away, silted and overgrown with myth.
Kevin McKelvey teaches at Purdue University and this Fall will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Indianapolis. His work recently appeared in Plainsongs, Poems & Plays, River Oak Review and Timber Creek Review. The Indiana Arts Council awarded him an Individual Artist Grant for 2005-2006. Kevin received a Moondancer Fellowship to the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and was Writer-in-Residence with the Spring Creek Project in Oregon and an Artist-in-Residence at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior.