I Will Fight No More Forever

We trusted in bad promises, meant only to deceive

A man is known forever by the tracks he tends to leave

When there’s thunder in the mouth there should be lightning in the hand

Before too many moons we’d lost our herds and all our land

We were put on reservations behind lines we couldn’t pass

Not every sweetened root is giving birth to sweetened grass

I’m told that we agreed to move that day I made my “mark”

And all this time I only feared a dog that wouldn’t bark

With the buffalo all slaughtered, what’s a tipi without skin

The wolf inside is bad and good, the one you feed will win

They forced us from our land, our way of life we couldn’t keep

Our pleasures now run shallow and our sorrows now run deep

It doesn’t take that many words to simply speak the truth

My little boy’s a prisoner before he’s grown a tooth

It takes more than a single rain to make a single crop

You cannot rape the land once there are no more trees to chop

My life is now a shadow running ‘cross the grass to dusk

A way of life’s been stolen like the corn stripped from a husk

I’m reminded in my anger what my father used to say

“You can’t allow your ‘yesterday’ to use up your ‘today’”