God's drum, and other cycles from Indian lore

God's drum, and other cycles from Indian lore by Hartley Burr Alexander is a collection of poetry written in the early 20th century. The book gathers lyrical cycles inspired by Indigenous North American and Mesoamerican lore, blending landscape, ceremony, and myth into meditations on nature, community, and the sacred.

The poems move from hymns to sun, wind, night, and prairie life to visions of ceremony and dance, where humans are small within a chanting earth and “God’s drum” beats day and night. They turn intimate in “Spirit Songs,” voicing love, war, and mortality, then widen to mythic and historical vistas in “The Red Apocalypse,” where mountains become priests, creation is remade in fire and water, the stars foretell endings, and colonial violence is faced in elegies like the moccasin from Wounded Knee. “Poems of Pueblo Land” interpret Pueblo symbolism through the potter’s bowl, beadwork, seasonal dances, the Corn Maidens, and the syncretic feast of Saint Dominic, alongside portraits of artisans, an outcast woman’s tragedy, and an elegy for the dead pueblo of Pecos. The closing hymns invoke Aztec deities—Tezcatlipoca, Xochiquetzal, Quetzalcoatl, Tonatiuh, and Xiuhtecutli—praising storm, sun, fire, and flowering life, uniting the book’s central themes of sacred nature, ritual beauty, loss, and renewal.