The snow had come early that winter. It lay in wind-polished drifts across the open Dakotas, a white hush waiting to be broken. In the half-light of morning, breath formed clouds around the mouths of Lakota children, and the elders stirred coals back to life beneath their thin canvas shelters. Hunger clung to everything. The treaties had been broken again, and the agency rations were spoiled or delayed again.
But still, they danced.
Wind fights the sun to drench the ground,
But it can't scale the hallowed sound,
Nor fasten taps to body shields,
To auras fused in starlit fields.
The sky is falling,
The sky is falling,
The sky is falling.
They danced because Wovoka had spoken. A vision sent through the sun’s eclipse, when the world darkened in the middle of the day and everything stood still for just long enough to believe it could change.
He said: The ancestors are coming. The buffalo will return. The earth will be made new.
So they danced. They danced to remember what it was to be whole, to speak the language of thunder and cottonwood, to run alongside the shaggy herds that fed them, clothed them, carried their souls across the land.
But dreams at night are falling,
And tears in sighs are blue;
Beams backlight the shadow
To light the nighttime dew.
Their shirts, painted in patterns of stars and circles, were called Ghost Shirts. Some believed they were bulletproof. Others knew better. But when your children are crying for food and the army is drawing closer, hope can become a kind of armor.
The Ghost Dance was not a war dance. It was a prayer. But to the men at Fort Meade, it looked like defiance. They didn’t understand how grief moves, how it turns in spirals, how it wails through the body until it finds a rhythm, until it becomes a song. Instead, they saw only agitation. A threat.
So they sent for Sitting Bull. He was old now, more symbol than strategist, but his name still carried thunder. On December 15, 1890, they came to arrest him, and in the confusion, some say provoked, he was shot dead.
The sky is falling,
The sky is falling,
The sky is falling.
Two weeks later, they came for Big Foot’s band, fleeing south to Pine Ridge, many of them sick with pneumonia, some still carrying Ghost Shirts beneath their coats. The 7th Cavalry, eager to avenge Custer, surrounded them at Wounded Knee Creek.
The guns they brought were Hotchkiss. Shell-firing. Precision-made for tearing bodies apart.
A single shot was fired, maybe by a deaf Lakota who didn’t understand the order to disarm. No one knows for certain.
And then, the world broke open.
When it was over, more than 250 Lakota lay dead, including women, children, and even babies shot as they ran. The snow turned red and then froze that way. Photographers came. They posed the bodies. Congress awarded medals.
Years later, a soldier wrote in his memoirs: It was not a battle, but a slaughter.
The Ghost Dance stopped.
But not the vision.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling,
The sky is falling in earthed hues.
FLM (August 2025)
(after the massacre at Wounded Knee)
They danced upon the frozen ground,
the wind in braid and hair,
a circle drawn in hungry hope,
a prayer stitched from despair.
The elders spoke of visions bright
when sun eclipsed the land:
A world restored, the buffalo,
and ghosts who take your hand.
Their shirts were stars and feathered breath,
their eyes the dusk’s last gleam,
and every footstep stirred the bones
of something more than dream.
They danced for those who went before,
for rivers wide and pure,
for memory that would not die,
for grief no heart could cure.
The soldiers saw a restless crowd,
their fear a loaded gun,
they could not read the language made
of sky and song and drum.
They marched with hunger in their boots,
their buttons made of brass,
and found the camp at Wounded Knee
beneath the withered grass.
They gathered up the weary band,
said, Lay your rifles low.
The people gave what little they had,
but still, the wind said no.
A shot rang out. Who fired first?
The stories twist and fray.
But blood will always find the snow
and never wash away.
The Hotchkiss guns did not relent;
the babies could not run.
The river froze in sudden flame,
the dance was overdone.
They say three hundred souls were lost
in silence sharp and red.
The medals glinted on the chests
of men who shot the dead.
But still the Ghost Dance waits beneath
the earth we cannot see.
It moves in roots and bones and wind,
in dreams where we are free.
And some still dance at edge of dawn,
with stars upon their skin,
a heartbeat for the world to come,
a breath for what has been.
Mari Fitzpatrick ( FLM August 2025)
Wind fights the sun to drench the ground,
But it can't scale the hallowed sound,
Nor fasten taps to body shields,
To auras fused in starlit fields.
The sky is falling,
The sky is falling,
The sky is falling.
Where wisps are brewed, blow heaps in mounds;
In textured strings it shifts around,
And banks of jazzy clouds shock hills--
Cast high, to fatten, twist, and chill.
But dreams at night are falling,
And tears in sighs are blue;
Beams backlight the shadow
To light the nighttime dew.
In seasons set in common riffs,
Where fertile clouds re-work the shifts,
Wind knocks and pounds to conduct day,
And moans at drifts that weave and stray.
The sky is falling,
The sky is falling,
The sky is falling.
Where kids mark time in schoolrooms,
Folk step on clocks that bloom,
And days are scented in sky runs
From the sky that fell at noon.
It’s scented our horizons,
It touched down in fields,
And in our season’s weather,
Its waves washed up to our knees.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling,
The sky is falling in earthed hues.
FLM (2018)