The University of Texas at Austin

Law in Popular Culture collection

The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006)
reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum

Lawyers & Poets
A World Ever So Mad

FRANK POMMERSHEIM
_______________________


September 11: Three Years Later
in South Dakota


It is September 11
three years later
here
in South Dakota

The prairie grasses
still wave,
go on
and yet . . .

They seem to bend,
even bow,
recalling
their fallen

Tall grass sisters
in that gouged,                                       
blackened field
at ground zero.               

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Frank Pommersheim teaches at the University of South Dakota School of Law where he specializes in Indian law. Prior to joining the faculty in 1984, he lived and worked on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation for ten years. He currently serves on a number of tribal appellate courts throughout Indian country including Chief Justice for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Court of Appeals and Associate Justice for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Supreme Court.
Pommersheim is the author of Braid of Feathers: American Indian Law and Contemporary Tribal Life (University of California Press, 1995) and numerous scholarly articles. His most recent collection of poetry is Haiku for the Birds (Rose Hill Books, 2002).