Four Poems by Kimberly L. Becker

Headwaters

This strange land formed and haunted by movement of glaciers. Outsized rocks called cannonballs. Remembering cannonball holes in brick in colonial Williamsburg. Remembering how the Thomas Legion fought for land already stolen. What starts, what forms, from where? You spread the family genogram out like a map (arbitrary lines imposed on ancestral lands) and see all the trauma lines

leading to you. You decide to break the secrecy, starting with your son. Some see only the present. Someone says in my presence It’s been a hundred years; they should get over it Now Arctic glaciers are calving too often. Now the water is rising in Appalachia, on the Plains, interspersed with fire and drought. You come upon a washed-out road; have to decide whether to try to drive through it.

Decide against the risk of being washed away, but turning back is no better. You see the car filling with water, break the glass like you were ready to do on the Bay Bridge. Your sweat is cold; you begin to sink in syncope. You remember to take the next breath. You remember the source of your strength. You watch a crane lift off as bombers mark the airspace.

Migration

All these birds on their way

Stopping point

Poised in water

Skeins in air

Gulls far from the sea

Pelicans awkwardly elegant

As a child, I dreamt I could fly

I would wake and feel disappointed

that I’d lost that power

Once, I ran from the top

of a hill, hoping to hoist

myself into the air

I stopped short, winded,

watching hawks’ effortless

tilt and turn

Here I saw an eagle

busy over prey

then its lift off

all muscle and majesty

I instinctively lifted a prayer

as it arose in glorious expanse

Other birds are on their way,

migrating elsewhere,

while Eagle remains

blessing this land

with thrust of wings

with feathers that adorn

your eagle staff

with the fearsome flight

of a survivor

of a warrior

Tributary

Everything feeds into something else

We join and join

Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee

and all the lesser rivers

We flow and flow

Your tribe sets out reminders in the water

of your presence and evidence of new life

that will continue onward

in the flow of history,

in the stories of elders,

including the river

This system of water

Network of movement,

not stasis

Damming the power

for power of control

fails to regard the floodplains’ need of regular

natural flood, so life can thrive

Dams on the upper made the lower worse

Deluge of memories not contained

At night if you listen, you can still

hear the river insisting on passage

Take you and me:

we join and join

Both of us tributaries of heritage

that brought us to this place

Our bodies carry memories within us

of our respective rivers

Too old to create new life,

I still make a new life from the old

We stand on the bank

and cast our prayers into the water

in tribute to those whose prayers

were silenced in their original languages

The language of the river transcends

miscommunication

The dam was in the English of the colonizer, but

the river is Indigenous,

sinuous, ingenious

Always flowing and joining,

expanding arteries of lifeblood,

despite the manmade flood

Water Cycle

This cycle continues

This replenishment

The opposite of trauma

that cycles to deplete,

generation on generation

We all need fresh water

and many don’t receive it

On the Plains, clouds form and turn

You tell me you can see tornadoes coming

I say that is of little comfort

We cycle through grief

yet are fed by its springs