“All miners name their mines after their wives,”
so complained one wife to her husband in an old
story from the Black Hills during the rush, he complied:
today an antique store carries the name in Keystone,
the home of Mount Rushmore – once Paha Sapa,
the sacred hills where Lakota boys would camp
to dream of the Great Spirit, Wakan-Tanka,
and in the morning wake in a holy land
that by night had made them men – Holy Terror:
a joke to the miner who did not have to watch
the bounds of holiness collapse into wear, or
rock-blasted into the faces of men who taught
a country to walk too well before it came
to the borders of a land, and a god, and their names.
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