Cowboys and Indians

What might have been a grudge
was a flowering of unlike things.
Rampant images, visions of warfare
projected angry in black and white,
Cowboys, Indians, guns, arrows
were nothing more different,
nothing more at odds than
the separate notes of one long song,
almost as if the stories on both sides of the fence
relied upon each other
to survive what time has told the world
was a crisis of morality,
a slow-bleeding wound to the national history.

We are the descendants of one or the other.

I wonder now if time has turned tables,
reversed the damage and folded the evidence
into things we no longer see.
Indians in Cowboy hats, Cowboys
on the sidelines and at peace.
We are too far into a future
we thought would never come
to know the difference between our anger,
our happiness,
and our remorse.