"All of the Indians are Dead (a Good Indian is a Dead Indian)"

The title of this post is the first line of the poem "Oklahoma" from Ernest Hemingway. 

It works! It grabbed our attention. 

This poem was published in Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923). And the name says it all, its a tale of the "Oklahoma" of the Choctaw language - means "red people" - and Oklahoma the state seen through its genesis the Indian Territory. 

There is a lot behind the short lines: the "good Indian" and the "dead Indian" of General Sheridan, the oil of the Osage Tribe, the cottonwood and the buffalo dung of campfires - perhaps also a bit of the cottonwood that "gave birth to the stars" -, STD with its pain and blindness, the old American Indian remedies... 

What can I tell you? Clever Hemingway!

And now to the poem.

All of the Indians are dead

(a good Indian is a dead Indian)

Or riding in motor cars—

(the oil lands, you know, they’re all rich)

Smoke smarts my eyes,

Cottonwood twigs and buffalo dung

Smoke grey in the teepee—

(or is it myopic trachoma)

The prairies are long,

The moon rises,

Ponies

Drag at their pickets.

The grass has gone brown in the summer—

(or is it the hay crop failing)

Pull an arrow out:

If you break it

The wound closes.

Salt is good too

And wood ashes.

Pounding it throbs in the night—

(or is it the gonorrhea)