Liam Remembers a Chautauqua Ridge
after “Deirdre Remembers a Scottish Glen”
– author unknown, 14th century
Summer of my body’s feeding: erased by
defiant wind and ice, by snows that took sixty-
seven lives this month, while the waves of Lake Erie
rose & stayed in place, dancing like a photo-
graph of hazy light, one crest, foaming above the
rest, turning & asking.
Land wild with Winter Gold & rooting boar, a roof
of owls above coyote tracks, sleepwalking snow, dreams
of fallen grapes. Land wild with white pine, a revving
plow, the price of heat, the flame above the Shale
Creek Falls. Land of the Unhoused with far-off scraping
shovels. The outreach worker with handwarmers, test strips,
& a two-way, racing to a clearing laced with
box elder, calling out to John, a Seneca
man, just outside the rez, frozen under an A-
frame— gone, quick as a deer breaking through the tree line.
Winter, all crammed up against the golden hills of tomorrow,
burns blisterblack. The storm of the dead is a ringing
pain of silence off the white wing beat of snow. I drive
home through the lake’s crying, squint and pray to the blue knife sleet.
As the trees turn a dark purple, the heartwood of land rumbles
to remember the bright heartbeat of bees, to remember
the emerald warmth of skin.
Nathan Erwin is a land-based poet from the northernmost tier of Appalachia. A community organizer, he currently operates with the Pocasset Wampanoag tribe fighting for land, food, and seed sovereignty. His writing has recently appeared in The Journal, Ninth Letter, and Poetry Wales.
Header photo by Mirosław i Joanna Bucholc, courtesy Pixabay.
