Ahhhh, Oklahoma!

I don't feel at home here,

Even if they do have a statue of my cousin, George Gist,

High atop the Capitol dome.

They urge us to pray for the leaders here,

And George, or Sequoia, as you may know him,

As brilliant as he was with letters,

Did not see how the Cherokee alphabet

Would mostly be used to promote the gospel, 

And the gospel would be used to christianize and castrate the Cherokee.

My great great great great grandfather Doublehead saw.

He was one of the tribal elders, 

And when the Moravians offered to build Christian schools

On Cherokee lands in 1798,

He asked them if they were going to teach or preach.

And when they said "both,"

"Then go home!" Chief Doublehead told them.

But who am I?

I am not an inventor of alphabets.

I'm not a chief, or even a very good matriarch.

I seem homeless to you, without a country.

But I am the virgin land itself.

I am the virgin people,

Restored to full hope and full vitality,

And when you, or anyone else, of any race or religion or belief,

Come to me with your moral superior high ground,

And your manifest destiny under your arm,

Before you can infect me with your cultural diseases,

And submit me to your polite society and political correctness,

I will go full blood warrior!

I will dip my arrows in botulism

And shoot them through your trite ideologies.

Oh, and I will pray for the leaders.

I will pray that they cry out in a forsaken language

As they stand amidst the rubble of their shattered isms.

-jenn