Poets And Poetry Of New England
Ron Welburn: Selected Poems
"Our Songs of the Breed"
The threshold for Indians
Mixed in blood is old enough
To be ordinary. Across
The big river our relative believe
We are all new to this.
But we have been on the farm since
The sturgeons withdrew; we have
Hidden in the census since
The beaver left fewer dams.
Our songs of the breed
Are the three-quarter songs
Handed down mother to son,
Father to daughter like Blankets
And sweetgrass pincushions, legacies of
Mysterious schools in New Jersey,
And knowing, father to son,
On which bank of the river the crayfish
"Ceremonies with Dark Red Men"
"Thanksgiving" morning 1995
Many, like Tommy were three-quarters whose Mothers
didn't want them taken away. "Indian"
was a word family trained them to forget,
sparing everybody the pain here in the Promised Land,
where lineage, they say, is beyond reach.
"Inherit the wind," they say, as meaning sign to
inherit the void, the heart empty of its country.
Mr. Maples and Mr. Generals must have known this.
I would bet on it! My household was two clan villages.
My neighborhood a bramble of totem figures
ambushed by the line of least resistance.
My father never related his dances,
his steps in those sole-shorn loafers
he hated to throw away.
Watching him gave me a wonderful feeling,
a rush of the rivers around our lives and
the thrill we shared in all that continuity.
And then it was over, like a nighthawk
glimpsed along the edge of the trees'
just about as fast as it takes
to imagine his line of flight, my father
stopped his dance and went on to lunch.
So sit with the old men retired from jobs, not Indian country
Once conductor on the New York subways
Once iron workers, steam fitters, longshoremen
Once accounting coordinator, teacher
The guitarist of that juke-joint circuit
Another three or four who fight the liquid fire,
losing and winning
The ones knowing heartache other than as patriots removed.
And so the young men still talk with me
as they did when I was a young man,
and their words for what they know
would keep their hearts above the ground.
Called on for a prayer here or there,
the young women invite me as elder to take
the first food; to renew these ceremonies with dark red men.
"Identity's Stand"
Who wins the battle for identity?
The line of least resistance carries survival into death.
The names of our homelands genuflect at alters of
greed, the pencil, and ridicule,
as the creeks run West to the Bay
emptying the silt of ancestry,
the casual sites of recollected displacements.
Accomac, hand into fingernail peninsula,
hilltowns to the flatter plain, new nomenclatures.
Whose children born in exile from the reservations
remember our origins, stories, ceremonies?
Gingaskin Chiptank Pamukey Ani-unwiya
Who joined Calvert's little RC diaspora,
diocese strew from new meteors showing
curious stones from a hungry realm of the universe?
It must have terrified our ancestors
Rolling in their graves at the sound of renamed origins.
This least resistance is a danse macabre
to the run-out memory, identities overrun by theatre
sinking deep into shadows, or herding to cross the Bay to
the Powhattan shore.
It is all too casual to let go the spirit,
too casual to lose shell as a sign,
too dangerously casual to drift in least resistance,
to be whatever they determined, expected, classified
"The Moorings"
for Steve
walking across the ceiling
of the earth the sun
escapes into a cluster of cloud
there is music up there
and the sun hides an instrument
from us. we can hear it
like melodies that streaked about
my room like razors shot
from zip-guns of street youth.
the music is that strong
and all around us sound exceeds
our grasp. We can touch our voices
but hardly the words we speak.
the meanings of our lives
are desperate in the tarnished brass
weapons we carry around,
preparing for battles left us
by divinities.
the sun is a bulb of sound
its harmonies wash
our incongruencies with sweat.
we began with only the valves
of our horns as percussion
and called the sun africa.
because of the sun we felt
it necessary to hope, to pray.
our rooms were lighted by fires
that clicked in our gestures
the way dice make a bony sound
against the moorings of a brick house.
our music paralleled new york sound
and could have killed us
then if we kept on
would there have been a better way to go?
the rumbling voices coaxed
from the cowskins and turkish brass
were spirits fighting our own tensions.
no room was ever big enough
no space adequate
our place under the sun
tried to kill the imagination
sometimes with strong drink
one day with disillusions
another with loneliness
the next with fear
but there is no fear beneath
the clouds were the sun
hides out and lets us hear song.
"The Mirror and the Hollywood Indian"
Like coups, deceptions too catch us.
Once we belonged to nations and to tribes.
The idea of being part-Indian
belonged only to those who sought no alternatives.
On the homestead or the reserve
we knew what our names meant.
Leaving Nanticoke, Cherokee village,
Brandywine, the fringes of Robeson country,
the enclaves of Lenape stretched from
Jersey to Kansas, the Piscataway-
Places, land that knows who we are,
Mashpee, the Ramapoughs, Schoharied country.
Then came the movies:
Italians and wigged huns
war-whooped and died at the feet of John Wayne,
bonnets streaming, yelling heap big
bad mouths; then along comes
a blue-eyed Geronimo; then we have
a speechless X Brand leaping off
rooftops in Derringer's New Orleans.
Into our mirrors we sought
that definition our families claimed,
hidden from may of us by snub noses
and rough hair.
We sought the Hollywood Indian
and did not see him.
We refused to see the eagle in ourselves.
"Crows among the Hawkweed and Black-Eyed Susans"
Season, open your mouth this morning
and speak colors.
Embrace me to the spring smells of your breasts.
Show me a grandmother's field
dotted with shrub.
speak with me of hawkweed's
hearts creeping toward the rock shelves;
then tell me more about
the black-eyed susans
with the yellow faces
who traipsed through my puberty,
multiplying, serene on the slopes
of manhood, and Season,
I will offer you my knowing
that band of crows walking
among them, foraging grubs
and the mouse carcass,
colors spoken for my imagination
adrift from Nanticoke waters.
Season, I sing for you
of these crows among the hawkweed
and these susans who lead me
to my sisters, my brothers,
and my love.
"Bones and Drums"
for Lewis McMillan
Generations unfold from our faces.
You will find kwanza celebrants
and bearers of yourba, ibo, and muslim
names with connections in the cherokee,
gestures among the chicksaw;
a hoop broken like the faces, mouths,
a few brows native to apalachicola,
catawba, creek and ramapos.
Has America ever noticed
how some of these voices match
the trombone? the big horn of
Big Chief Russell Moore,
Big Green, Snub Mosley,
and Jack Teagarden we speak of;
Does the America recall Shunatona
at the '28 Inaugural?
What does it know of Willie Colon,
Steve Turre and so many salseros
in this bull eagle's timbre of speaking.
Have they listened to the bass,
a tree of rhythm smooth as Blanton,
sinewy as Pettiford, thickset as Mingus,
supple as a Rozie.
Or drums, Baby Lovett to Sunny Murray,
for a basic two-step
a round dance grass dance beat
on the stretched snare hide of ponca city,
tishomingo, okmulgee, tahlequa,
the rolling piano of muskogee;
sock cymbals and high hats
of seed beads, patterned and flowing
like leaves in a river
in the split accents of 4/4.
"Walking to the Moon"
October 1996
Of Paumanouk's south shore
three humpbacked clouds
follow me to the moon,
and they are outpacing my leisure
to walk this Amagansett beach
with no purpose but the moment.
Without you I would indulge
the tides to lick my feet,
something about being alone here
at dusk while absorbed in the moonlight
and the white sand.
I am walking to the moon
as the sun goes down on this good day.
to the south which the clouds arch over,
my Nanticoke must think of this
as a small magic,
a vision of man and sea animals,
parallel travelers toward the claw tip of turtle's continent.
with each stride I am
closer to the grandmother of light,
closer to that place
shared by dream and the sea.
She sings my approach
so I would realize what power she
and the ocean have on lovers walking arm in arm
at this rim of the turtle.
then, on her side of a mound,
Piping Plovers rise from play
to escape above the surf just as we do,
revealed to the world in a furtive kiss.
Signaled is my moment of return,
having the moon now smile at my back,
at peace with my longing for you.
"Holding the Courtship Drum"
Courting like a ruffed grouse
a man has to concentrate,
be oblivious to vehicle drone.
You're at the edge of trees.
You fan and strut into display
with your chest poked out,
your neck swollen to get down.
The woman you've got a bead on
is in a thicket, pretending
to ignore you; pretending
the traffic has drowned out
the sound of your drum.
She's half delighted and
she's half scared to death,
'cause in this world
if a horn's sound startles you
and breaks the drum beat,
her heart will sink into her belly
until you compose yourself again,
and lift her sweetly
to dance with you.
"The Grandfather Corn"
Each day of those later pow wows she lifted the grandfather
corn from her class case and, breaking off a kernel, gave a
piece of her
ancestry to the open hands of a child. She knew she was
completing
a circle, and as often as she felt the weight of the blessing
bestowed
in giving, the blessing and its domain overwhelmed her.
The words scared or frightened were spoken but that wasn't
it. She gave freely the kernels she twisted from the hull of
dried pale
sustenance in honor of the stones whose bodies she adorned
with
beads and bone and shell and wire. Silver is a soft metal, and
corn is
soft and each piece taken will give a child a night of rest in
this
world's restless tumult.
Each piece given is a story of the samp eaten in Quogue and
memories of Sugarloaf Mountain.
Each piece given is a story of walking back to Rome,
Georgia
all the way from Tahlequah on a path marked by tears.
with each kernel of this white corn she gave something of
legacy, the proud inevitable return.
"Scudded Sky Evening"
Sea fishermen's blood
courses her veins,
pumping that strong heart that knows how
scudded skies will
soak tomorrow longer than the dew.
Beauty alone designs this sunset.
The water above us roams muted
in gold and orange and odd wonderful
shades of lavender and blue.
Scallop clouds.
Shell row upon shell row.
She knows them.
We see her make with them
a mantle of heaven to wear
dancing, stomp dancing
around the fire that evening.
Scallop clouds,
clouds with secret colors
shells in hands
held beneath the mantle of the evening.
Never deny this design
or doubt the heart whose ancestry,
lost in the storm off Quogue,
moves on the water
intimate with the gale winds.
"In the Absence of Gourds"
In the absence of gourds,
plastic water jugs must do
for birds to drink at my hand.
Both concession and another gesture
of survival, stoking inward fires of ancestry.
I do not look the same
as I did half a millennium ago
on the threshold of invasion, then slavery;
on the eves of annihilation and disease.
None of us has exactly that look,
though we all distinctly look alike,
and have the same sounds in our speaking:
a certain round directness,
a special quill texture to our sharpness,
proud, measured, and uncluttered mouths.
Though we may speak no Indian tongue,
we hear the ghosts
of our languages
in what we say.
____________________
"A Sentimental Reason"
A gull flies near this building,
circling it sometimes, flapping away
the swift currents this far up
the penthouse, or diving into them.
one sees the glint of its eye
how in the spark of its flight
there lies some sentimental reason,
buoyed perhaps by a crooner's songs
and the clearing skies, and
the crows playing with the width
of the river like a guitar.
"Crow Scene: Housatonic Valley, Massachusetts"
Crows play the morning's mist
and frolic in black-fingered flights
chasing and twisting to
create bold beadwork designs:
harvest beltbuckles and fancydance rosettes,
sinew thread winged through yellow squash;
and they use orange, green, red from maple
leaving tastes of summer and of brown
to dance in the white day.
The whole world is a crow's loom
this autumn, colors given us by our mother
in the light of our father the sky.
Crows swoop through our eyes
to stitch these mountains to our souls.
A band patterns the Mahican hills
long before the sun burns off the dew,
beading more colors onto the land,
at joy calling the angles of the rain.
They sing and play tag, weave,
reconnoiter, light emerging around them.
Then, hungry, they'll settle along
the side of the road
for a meal of scrambled possum,
or perhaps what's left of a friend.
"A Theory of Art"
Birds of prey and hawkweed
out of my mouth, I consider
the valley of theories; then
laying aside my mangle
I climb through the wordy slopes
of definition to my place
of stone and thistle on the hill.
Around this perimeter
I hesitate responsibility,
cannot burden and imbue my songs
with nooses to dangle artifice.
Maker of images,
I am irreverent now, for
when in good heart vision
I can raise my songs like birds
hundreds at a time that
spin oblong circles
changing character
to resettle on the lake or field
in a glorious rush.
This art, a holy action of minds
and feathers jelled as one.
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