WHEREAS

The poem “WHEREAS” by Layli Long Soldier is part of a longer, continuous section within the book of the same name. The subsection in Part II in which the excerpt appears is entitled “(1) Whereas Statements.”

“WHEREAS” is comprised of 20 stanzas of unrhymed free verse. Stanzas one through four and six through nine are long-lined couplets, with a tercet—or three-lined stanza—at stanza five. The following eight stanzas are monostiches: one-line stanzas. The final three stanzas are blocks of prose poetry without line breaks, comprised of varying length sentences. Every stanza in the poem ends with a semicolon.

The book entire, and this poem in particular, responds to a quietly introduced 2009 U.S. Senate resolution that undertook an apology to Native American tribes for historic violence and mistreatment.

In stanza one, a “blue-eyed man” (Line 1) “enters the discussion” (Line 2), which has already begun. In stanza two, he waves his beer bottle and declares, “at least there was an Apology” (Line 3) to the supposedly learned group. The man keeps “cool” (Line 2); “his “work-weary lips” indicate exhaustion from a job in which he does a good deal of speaking, rather than manual labor.