The Sun Was Unclouded

Here in the flatlands, it's autumn and absolutely gorgeous. I'll admit it: Mississippi is growing on me. This weekend roommate and I went with a sweet friend to ride horses in the southern part of the state, and it was gorgeous and rolling hills and her parents are vets and I felt I'd stepped into the Mississippi version of James Herriot. All that to say--the desert is starting to bloom.

And last week, in poetry class, we each got individual assignments. Mine was to write about something BIG--a war, a natural disaster, etc. Arghh. Now, I write about small things, ordinary things, I am kin to Dickinson, not Whitman. But I set myself to do it, and I'm not sure how it happened but somehow a poem about the Alabama Cherokee and Trail of Tears came out. Near Florence, there's a man who's spent years building a wall, a memorial to the tragedy. So here's another stone for the remembering.

The Sun Was Unclouded--

“The Cherokees are a peaceable, harmless people, but you may drive them to desperation, and this treaty cannot be carried into effect except by the strong arm of force.”
-Major William M. Davis, 1837

How can I put you in a poem, dustfoot
people? Your trees were faithless, in the end.
How you wove rivers in the skin and glassed
the long hut after all. The forest went wild
for grief after you left. Oh sweet warrior,
first friend, the smoke and salt of you lingered
long after the cane broke. How many calloused
eyes, how much broken before the wheels?
The tear-pocked dust should have swollen, crumbled
into earth red earth, sprouted sudden
mountains on the empty distant line of land and sky.
If the rocks rose up to cave you, if your graves
mounded numb and deep, if you somehow found
eastern sky again, if the trees refused to cover
your desperate bare--if anyone tried to say
you were fully desirous--then know your blood
was too fresh for them, too wooded,
too earth for that manifest. Real people, know
your soft language still tongues their brain.