Call and Remembrance

1

Somewhere at the beginning of memory, the voice calls up and down the generations; a loon dreamed across a widening lake.

Then we can speak with adults and children residing there. Perhaps children of my child’s children, root stock voicing my long attended passions.

Memory is this thing about time that lives outside of remembering. My memories linger about like the scrub pine of the Delmarva’s coasts, deepened millennia before the entry of ships and disease and the awful cargo of masters & slaves about to pass through us.

Remembering could be so deliberate an action, a desperate gesture by the dreamer about the dreamed, til the call comes down as a scream or admonition, an instruction offered from the dreaming where we are, for an instant multiplied—you can bet on it!—the dreamed of lineages and birthrights.

My ancestors figure in the mists of the Smoking mountains, children of Selu and Kanati; my people are children chasing sanderlings along the peninsular shore.

2

Meeting Caribs, I inhabit the thought I could be related to a Turtle Island captive, iron-tethered to a cargo hold; fathers from my mothers’ clans begging of the listless sun: who now will teach him his ways? And would I recognize a face, the stance with the heavy neck and shoulders of home? Would I recognize the dream landscapes spoken between mountain and shore, dialogues proposed in cold/hot repartee? Elders teach us through remembering, grandparents from the wolf or potato or bird; people alive on our faces as we emerge from wombs; songs not just for around the fire but for our sisters.

Onto this Turtle’s back, many birthrights mingle blood from distant shores: some in balafons and talking drums. I have a matriarch diverting mixed-blood grands from the orphan home: red-faced children losing the redder mother; 1924; the matriarch having lost her husband much indigenous to Delmarva’s shore, 1924; approaching 80 to raise six children. Never too busy to love, to narrate a renewed system of her own stories.

I walk back beyond the intangible lines, past the rocks jutting from waterfalls deep into the trees via a trunk bridged across the stream; beyond the sullen memories of acreage and private boundaries opening labyrinths of intention.

Here, still, on the Turtle’s back, conscious rhythms of the changing moon nudge her secrets onto me, pushing and echoing out of the places where listening is the natural order: mine are brother tribes of Lenape, Powhatan; the Aniyunwiya stones. the Gingaskin migration informs me. the African informs me. the Tuscarora, Lumbee, the Yamasi may speak. the Aniyunwiya stones.