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Wiping the Tears

By Erin Bad Hand | From Prairie Schooner – Summer 2025

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Originally published in the Winter 2012 issue

At my grandpa Leo’s funeral
they handed out rosary beads in bright colors
like blue and red and yellow and all the kids wore them

He didn’t know me
didn’t know my poetry so
I read him a poem

He was the one
who was always singing
I knew him as a voice at four o’clock
on summer-in-South-Dakota mornings

the one who knew all the words
to “Amazing Grace” in Lakota     Onuniyan tehanl waun
                                                      Masica tka wani . . .

the man who asked me to crow-hop
around his kitchen table to show him how I danced

(They say when someone you respect passes on
you stop singing for a year, to honor their memory . . .)

At my grandpa’s funeral
I kept those rosary beads in my pocket
my singing voice in my throat

Erin Bad Hand is an indigenous poet, writer, and artist. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. She has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Taos Journal of Poetry and Art, and Toe Good Poetry, and has a chapbook And Then Everyone Can Rest (2002), published by the Hulbert Center Press of the Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. At present, she is homeschooling her four children and practicing gratitude in the breathtaking beauty of Sonoma County, California.