I wrote this poem after reading Steve Rinella’s book American Buffalo. It was a gift from my dad and ended up being an excellent read. I found the chapters about early man’s hunting of mammoth enlightening. That and the later history of how buffalo were massacred for profit in the early American West, were the two main sources of inspiration for this poem.
Beliefs
The mammoth and the mastodon— enormous underscores on Man’s myopia. There will always be enough, until there is suddenly nothing. You have to believe insane things to march across the plains killing every bison in sight, leaving their gleaming white corpses for the flies while you stack the fresh hides, or you have to believe nothing at all. Still, the bison remain, hiding in the bone-nourished trees and gullies, pummeling their roads, chipping the earth. Mostly a scent. More a wool cairn snagged in bark than a sight.