On Reconciliation
1.
Outside the city wall in Derry
stands a sculpture of two men
in their prime, thin and muscular.
They reach toward one another
their fingers not quite touching.
2.
In Belfast, a Felon’s Club is run by and for
former prisoners of The Troubles released by
the Good Friday Agreement. One from the IRA,
another from the Orangemen and a British
soldier speak about their path from enemy
to friend with respect. We ask how we might
learn to speak across our own notorious divide.
3.
I read the history of England: Britons
conquered by Rome, then by Anglo Saxons,
Danes, Norwegian Vikings, Normans, until they
must have thought it was the way of the world
to conquer others. War after war, back and forth
across the narrow Channel up and down the
island for six hundred years, no federal code
of law, only strongmen.
4.
At the bottom of a shallow pool lie mosaic
images of weapons, broken, cast aside,
released, in a ritual gesture.
5.
The national flag of Eire has three colors:
Orange for Protestant Union Loyalists.
Green for Catholic Republicans
White in the middle for peace.
Longfellow’s Mistake
After Layli Longsoldier
Did you read the "Song of Hiawatha" in school and think of him as a godlike figure
who loved and lost a human maiden, and also a peacemaker among Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) people who brought Christianity to Indians?
It is hard to enumerate all the problems this epic embodies, but one stands out: Hiawatha (Hyanwatha) was a man in the founding Haudenosaunee story, The Law of the Great Peace that led to the Iroquois Confederacy.
In his grief over the murder of his wife and children, Hiawatha gave in to despair, anger, violence before he was brought back into the human fold by Peacemaker’s patient act of listening and counting every detail of his pain.
Hiawatha and the Peacemaker—one human, the other mysterious (not Christian), were separate figures in an Iroquoian story.
The two went together from one of the five nations to another until their message of peace was embraced and the Confederacy of Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca and Cayuga was born.
Longfellow probably got it wrong because his friend, Henry Schoolcraft, the Indian Agent on Mackinac Island, merged the stories he had heard from Ojibwe, Dakota and Iroquoian people who stopped on the island.
Did Longfellow’s “Song” embody an inability to see differences between Indian nations, or a dream of human universality, or a drumbeat for Christianity?
The poet, who would become a favorite in his time, earning $3000 for a single epic poem, also merged Haudenosaunee and Ojibwe names and stories with a Finnish epic he had read during European travels as a younger man.
At Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis, a statue commemorates Hiawatha's love for the young woman, Minnehaha, an Ojibwe name, citing an Ojibwe story.
Who says poetry doesn't matter?
Estella Lauter was Poet Laureate of Door County in 2013-15. She has published four chapbooks of poems with Finishing Line Press and has co-edited two anthologies of poems about Door County along with the WFOP Calendar for 2017. She participates in The Grind as often as possible.