When you really want to break someone,
you take their kids.
We’re a simple animal, and bearing costs.
After the storm I go down the beach,
visit time, lenses of shell on shell,
thousands of practical years of
canoes and oysters, fires on the sand,
veils of cedar and the red bark of madrones
bright against the bluffs.
I call a guy I know from the tribe and we walk it, together,
eroding our way down the tideline,
sand in our socks.
It’s as big as we always thought it had to be,
if we ever saw it, which of course now we are.
The water’s rising, unstoppably.
Waves are breaking around our ankles.
We don’t have a design plan
for cheerful interpretive signage
about community heritage
when the end of history
is, here’s where your priests
took our kids and held them captive
and wouldn’t let us see our own children.
And, here’s where our priests
took your children, so they could get an education.
Now it’s a park!
We have all learned a lot, since then;
we have not learned enough to teach this.
Even if we could come up with a way
to word it, someone’s going to come along
some Sunday afternoon, with a paint marker,
and draw a mustache or maybe a dick
over the plastic-covered portrait
of someone else’s grandfather.
We’re standing on this beach in the rain,
watching history slosh out into the bay
to mix with dredge spoils
and abandoned vessels
and everything else the city would like to sink.
We climb back up to the parking lot
where we turn our keys and burn some hydrocarbons,
making everything just a tiny bit worse.
Two old ravens, tempest-tossed, half-seen, creaking,
land on the strand behind us,
scaly feet gritty with forgotten truths,
comfortable lies,
and the bones that wash out of creek banks
when nobody is watching.
Thank you – this is so good.