Wood Buffalo anthrax

I

We are strong
we are old
we've lived for years
as shaggy anachronisms
even before wire fences
strangled our brown herds' old ranges
And Sharps buffalo rifles
littered the prairie with us
legacy of a thousand faceless murderers
who shot us only for our humps tongues and hides
left the rest of our bodies to rot obscenely
then gathered and ground our bleached bones
to fertilise gardens inside the barbed garottes
wrapped tight around our ancestral land.

We few survived
called ourselves lucky
when we were left
to the unfamiliar woodlands
in the north
where descendants of the gun carriers drove us
because they had yet found not cause to begin slaughter
still again
we thought ourselves safe.

Now as we die, choking
blood bubbles from our mouths
mixed with our own foamflecked rumbling laughter.
We learned we survived to inherit
the old way of death.

II

We are subtle
we are old
we've slept for years
decades and centuries
the black joke of the herd
planted by ancestral fathers
of the buffalo
and their fathers
and their fathers
who spit us onto the earth as they lay dying
choking on their own blood
tongues lolling
from beastmouth grimaces.

They survived
calling themselves lucky
when they were not molested
too much by men
until one of the last of them
stumbled by kicking the dust where we laid
then inhaled us, patient waiting
spores of anthrax
death
in the life-giving earth
legacy of their fathers
as their fathers
and their fathers
died
before the gun carriers ever came.