Upon Seeing the Official Seal of the State of Indiana

Once the thought of Indiana
included bison leaping
over felled trees as if fleeing
the inevitable. Sun above
southern hills and solitary man
hacking at the base of the next
victim. When buffalo roamed
every bit was to be measured
in the humid darkness between
trees and the chatter from survivors
of ongoing eastern genocides.

Now, walking the central canal
this night flush with xenon light
and shallow cement bottomed
waterways of koi, that thought
is followed by wide sweeping
vistas of brick and stucco
that crowd this transplanted sense
of what a crossroads must be like
and the notion that these pathways
and the wide mainly vacant
roadways above have been built
with those bison in mind.

By D.A. Lockhart

Biography:

Born in Chatham, ON and raised in Windsor, ON, D.A. Lockhart holds degrees from Trent University, Montana State University, and Indiana University. He is a graduate of the Indiana University – Bloomington MFA in Creative Writing program where he held a Neal-Marshall Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in the Windsor Review, Sugar House Review, Hawk and Whipporwill, Straylight Literary Magazine, and Construction among others. He is a recipient of Canada Council for the Arts grant for Aboriginal People and Ontario Arts Council grants for his poetry. He is a research consultant and is editor-in-chief for Urban Farmhouse Press based out of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. He is a member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. His first collection of poems, Big Medicine Comes to Erie, will be released this fall by Black Moss Press.