How long have they laid buried
in the sludge and grime of industry
erasing the river’s breath
and almost erasing the Duwamish people
who once paddled their canoes down
its current swift as the wing of kingfisher?
Walking beside the river in 2009 you can
still hear the dreams and laughter
of children picking serviceberry
with their grandmother teasing a crow
stealing berries from her basket.
You might glimpse ancestral villages,
longhouses yards from the riverbank
before settlers burned them to the ground ,
drove the small tribe to the city’s outskirts.
Seattle, too easily the age slipped a false-face
mask on you, a glass and concrete fashion cone
to give roaches the run of skyscrapers.
Although an alien in Salish country,
you were destined to become Raven’s cousin,
Killer Whale’s distant, ambivalent friend,
the many-mountains’-on-both-sides
adopted daughter when just an agate cut
from volcano and sea.
Seattle, my old salmonberry moon under a sky
as light as a tossed net, who remains,
leaping with salmon for old emotions?
Duane Niatum, “The Disappearance of the Duwamish Salmon” from Earth Vowels. Copyright © 2017 by Duane Niatum. Reprinted by permission of Mongrel Empire Press.
Source: Earth Vowels (Mongrel Empire Press, 2017)
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