SUSQUEHANNOCK

Water, Wood, Iron, Steam

Water springs from Oswego

flow trickles from streams and creeks

linking to the many tributary rivers

Juniata, Chemung, Swatara, Conodoguinet

washing into the shimmering surface island-pimpled

A riva cast into the Chesapeake converges the ocean.

Eroding the Appalachia, the river sweeping by

deposits deep soil, raises dense forests

sustains the gatherers with three planted beans

fills the hunter’s paradise with deer, bear, wolf

creates a fisherman’s bounty of bass, eel, and oyster,

now gone by industry, polluted by cows’ run off, Susquehannock drifts on, its mouth plugged.

Wood, life of the Haudenosaunee,

sovereigns of the dense forests,  owned by all

governed by mothers in a communal group

warmed in long houses dimensioned by pickets

their war arrows cut from soft pine shafts

The Tree of Peace stood in the center of the five-tribes

Mohawk were the keepers of the Eastern door.

Conquering the Delaware, Oyster River people,

Iroquois, stood sentinel to the Iron men

invading from ocean east bearing smooth bore guns

peace treaties made, land purchases allowed

Penn acquired sylvania in grant from a foreign king

the land surveyed, slivered in private pieces

the forests cleared, the wood burned to charcoal.

Iron, commodity of conquest

scraped from the shale mixed banks

forged in Codorus’ charcoal furnace from

discarded lumber of the cleared divided land

formed into musket shots, eliminating the bears,

pushing the wolves, the Iroquois into Canada,

The Tree of Peace, a covenant broken.

With cannon balls and ferrous swords

freedom won for commerce, for some, equality,

but time would forge division, south from north,

rifling and artillery stopped the Confederates

at the river’s edge,  the wide water crossing,

a wooden covered bridge, destroyed by the Union.

Replaced post-war with iron railroad trestles.

Steam clouds the sky above rail

engines hauling the needs of business

in coal-filled boxcars traversing

east to west, west to east, the

stone piers punctuating steel lines

aimed into the water gaps suspended

above the southern flood of water.

Boilers in the rolling engines

replaced by banked steam turbines,

fired by anthracite-made electricity

Conowingo hydro-dammed the water,

toxic sediment stops up the river reservoir.

White man’s nightmare fulfilled on Three Mile Island

when cavitated millions of gallons released.

Radioactive steam settles into the river and the woods

A thousand years could pass before paradise restored.