Bewildered Hummingbird
Last night,
Listening,
among trees that sprang
from nearby spring
named for a claiming settler,
approaching chant and drum pulsed
from deep copper tones of lips and fingers
having just arrived from Puget’s shore
through mountains and deserts and plains
to bluegrass knobs,
dancing along the way to collect prayers
for grace and goodness
at journey’s Potomac end
in plaintive appeal
to nine complicit
marble-chambered
alien ebony robes;
a gasp for reprieve from Resolve
to exhume copper gold that
rests below sacramental ridges now
Nest for interred Apache
umbilical cords
Shoulder for newborn Apache
first embrace of Maternal Soil
Spirit of Apache Lourdes, Temple Mount,
baptismal font melded into one.
Reprieve
not just for self
but for
spirit and body of
animal, plant, mineral whole
cradled by Earth’s pull.
Last night children of the West
listened and watched and prayed
even as they
lamented and quivered and grieved
the spectre
of their legacy’s unfolding toxic and terminal
chaos.
⋙⋘
That same morning I’d strolled
among echoes and shadows that
shimmered against
walls once housing not copper gold, but enslaved
ebony.
Here, at least,
grids of tender excavation,
not gods of terrific extraction,
gently trowel the earth for sacred relics
in remembered homage to those
bound bodies and
whispering spirits
who haunt with calls
to free progeny of both
giver and receiver
of whip and chain
from that shared spectral legacy.
⋙⋘
The book I now ingest questions how we tell
this legacy’s story.
A tale of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier triumph,
which (he claimed) instilled
perpetual immigrant rebirth and virtuous character
with each Westward wave?
Or one of preformed settler colonial logic
to doubly dispossess
Indigenous person and perception,
then occupy and replace
(while enabled through those others
abducted and imported)?
Rather, the author suggests, it likely is one of
particular people in particular places
sorting immediate contingency, choice,
misperception, ambiguity while
relying on a maze of
incompatible myths and aspirations to
engage and dispel
the dark unknowable at hand.
Perhaps, he suspects, rather than either of such
rationally privileged
inevitably pre-set
manifest destinies,
this imperial settler outcome we inhabit
might better reflect
accumulated encounters of
bewilderment.
⋙⋘
Last night,
Listening,
I learned that for Apache
the humble hummingbird,
whose image appeared ubiquitous among their
shared gifts and icons,
plays messenger
to bear word from angels
for ears calibrated
to hear.
How bewildered must those hummingbirds have been
at first encounter
with the ambition-clouded ears
of those who excavated labor and life
from bound backs shoddily housed
or those who would extract copper gold
from beneath sacred natal cords?
My question now,
As I next encounter
contingent ambiguous choice
while whirring wings approach,
Will the hummingbird again
depart bewildered?
[Prompted by personal experiences of August 29, 2024, that included a morning tour of excavated slave quarters (on former Oxmoor plantation in a Louisville suburb) and an evening ceremony (at McConnell Springs in Lexington KY) of the Apache Prayer Journey from Seattle to DC.
The journey, through other Native as well as settler communities, was planned to end with a US Supreme Court appeal challenging a defense bill rider that will both demolish their holiest site (Oak Flats AZ) through Resolution Copper Company mining access and set precedent for prioritizing mineral extraction over native sovereignty throughout the US.
While also having just begun to read Robert Parkinson’s book Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier. —VGO]
Gordon Oyer has authored two books and several essays addressing the social thought of Thomas Merton, and he previously served as editor of Illinois Mennonite Heritage Quarterly. He is retired from his career as an administrator for the University of Illinois System and currently lives in Louisville, KY.
