Blind Pumper at the Well: Poems from My 80th Year (Earthworks) - Softcover

Salisbury, Ralph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844714063 ISBN 13: 9781844714063

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2008

Synopsis

Blind Pumper at the Well, Poems from My Eightieth Year, evokes my "primitive" American Indian childhood and young manhood, and it evokes my awareness of modern life, my experience of war and the experience of others. The book is an affirmation of a peaceful life and a life lived in harmony with Nature. It evokes love, that between men and women and that among all human beings. It evokes my awareness of my 80 years of life and my coming death.

About this title

About the Author

Ralph Salisbury is of English-Irish-American Indian descent. His writing covers themes from ecology to anti-war protest and support for world brotherhood and sisterhood. He was a volunteer in the US Air Force in WWII, and became an opponent to the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq. His father’s father was a Cherokee medicine man. His paternal grandmother was a Cherokee-Shawnee story teller. A natural, self-taught musician with an eloquent voice, Salisbury’s father made a living as a traveling minstrel before settling on the Iowa farm, where Salisbury was born.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Killer Seeking Forgiveness

From where I will kill
a fellow creature, as
my Indian people have,
for generations, done,

I see
a porcupine,
its waddling body an ambulatory cactus,
which only the most benign intentions
of a poet’s tongue would even try to ease
into garden row or vase –

see pines,
which fought, like two of too many children,
for each other’s ration of sun,
and, now, the stronger lives on,
to gloat or to grieve –

and see,
disputing snow crimsoned by
some earlier hunter’s good fortune, crows,
as black as oil spilled by temblor
or greed’s heedlessness or war.

A sentinel crow is able to see, not me
but camouflaging leaves, from trees,
whose wood may heat someone’s home
and cook someone’s food eventually,

and, then, while wind weaves vines,
as if to mitten this trigger-finger hand,

my desperate family’s first meat,
after days of hunger, comes,
browsing some blossoms so
forgiving they are still enduring this freezing fall.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844714063
• ISBN 13: 9781844714063
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104