Prophetstown

Kevin McKelvey

               

- 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.

 

 

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