Poems by Ralph Salisbury[1]
Sometimes Likely
If you look white
like I do
And
work in the South
like
I do
and
want to go on making a living for
your
woman and children
like
I do
there
are some
of your people you
are
sometimes
likely
to forget.
--from Rainbows
of Stone
University of
Arizona Press, 2000
Ralph
Salisbury (hiding behind hat on left) with hired man, Cliff Bailey, and
siblings Ruth (lying on ground), Ray (standing), Rex (seated) and half-brother
Robert (Bob) Wessels (seated on right). Photo taken in the fields of the family
farm, Arlington, Iowa, 1933.
With the Wind and the Sun
When the squadron I
was in
bombed a Navajo
hogan, killing,
by mistake, some
sheep—
just
like that flipped out ancient Greek Ajax did—
and
blinded an elderly man,
my
white buddies thought it was funny—
all
those old kids' war-movies again
against
the savages, and,
ironically near where
the atom bit the dust, but
the Jew navigator,
who'd
thought World War Two
had been won,
didn't
laugh, and I,
hidden under a quite light complexion,
with the wind and
the sun waging Indian war
to reconquer my
skin
defended
myself
with
a weak grin.
--from "Going to the Water: Poems of Cherokee
Heritage"(Pacific House,1983), reprinted in "Light from a Bullet Hole: poems
new and selected 1950-2008" Silverfish Review Press, 2009
Ralph
Salisbury, Eugene, OR, 2006. Photo: Ingrid Wendt.
Swimming in the Morning News
A
mother is saved from drowning below a bridge
in
U.S.-bombed Baghdad, or,
she
is one of my Cherokee ancestors,
forging the
un-bridged, then, Mississippi near
present day St. Louis,
and crows,
flying
above my meditations,
make me remember
black hands of old clocks,
which awakened me
to cawing
the day I awkwardly swam
and
saved two young women from drowning,
today,
the somber wings of poetry so many's
sole
chance to survive.
--from
Like the Sun in Storm, The Habit of
Rainy Nights Press, an imprint of Elohi Gadugi, 2012 [Elohi Gadugi is Cherokee for "the world (elohi)""working together
in community (gadugi)"
Ralph
Salisbury, Akumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico, 2012. Photo: Julie Bray
A Coastal Temple Ruin, 1992
For
Octavio Paz and Cesar Vallejo
Surf echoing
Spanish cannon, or Aztec drums
summoning centuries
of slain,
victory-regalia-petals
proclaim sun
ascendant, while
rainbows wing
from
nests, to split banana beaks and sing
eons-extinct
sea-verge-ecology ancestries,
clouds,
roots, fragrance, fruit
offering
survivors of war in the genes more
than
invaders took
and
defenders gave
their
lives trying to save.
--from War in the Genes
Cherry
Grove Editions, WordTech Editions, 2005
Ralph
Salisbury, self-portrait, circa 1946.
For Robert Wessels
My
half brother, whose German-American father died,
in
the American army, in World War One, was,
in
World War Two, captured by Germans, who
flew
him from Tunisia to Sicily.
Escaped,
he worked on farms,
for
a hiding place and food,
while Italian sons
were U.S. prisoners of war.
Pick
grapes, scythe wheat—
make
wine, bake bread,
a little sanity
among
millions of the mad.
--from Blind
Pumper at the Well
Salt Publishing, Cambridge, UK, 2008
Ralph Salisbury, Fresno, California,
1970. Photo: Ingrid Wendt.
Old German Woman, Some
Wars
"Help
me!" she cries, faltering, reckless or trusting, from tram,
a
survivor of bombs, most likely, and, now,
a
flesh-and-blood bomb herself,
the
only possible target, me.
I'm
old, she's older, and I've no time to accuse,
"Coventry's
rubble," or her, the name
of
a map-coordinate I'd flown to set aflame.
Her hand finds the hand I've offered, her
feet meet
the cobblestoned
earth, we share
with thousands of
the living and with
those
billions, who waltz, in petal gowns,
or,
snail-shell-helmeted, march,
her
thanks an echo of mine,
war
ending, my bomber turning away from this city,
my
fate to live to write to be
ignored, or read,
by all
I would love to
save.
--from Blind
Pumper at the Well
Salt
Publishing, Cambridge, UK, 2008
Ralph Salisbury (right) with his
half-brother Robert (Bob) Wessels, parents Olive McAllister Salisbury and
Charles (Charlie) Salisbury
.
My
Country Again Threatening Aggression
(This
time, for oil in Iraq)
The sea, though
equally lethal, killing millions, seems sane,
as it destroys our
own and nations we call enemies.
More mathematically
predictable than Christians,
our crusaders will
change ocean to oil
then celebrate, not in cathedral
or temple or mosque
but in banks,
the union of women
and men –
and children
– with earth,
not sensing for even one instant
the sea's awesome
eons of giving and taking away.
--from Blind
Pumper at the Well
Salt Publishing, Cambridge, UK, 2008
Ralph Salisbury, Milwaukie, Oregon,
2013. Photo: Ingrid Wendt.
An
American-Indian Success Story in India
My abandoned grandmother's
raising twelve kids—
two years of study
all that my father could get,
before racism shut
down his school—
six years of
university for me, after what
the army had
taught—
a Bombay newspaper
reporter—
to whom I'd given
an interview
after her union's
strike had ended
press-censorship—honored
my family
as a Native
American success story.
Although assaulted
in their legislature,
India Indian women
won freedom for everyone,
and I would honor
here those
who honored my
American Indian father and
grandmother.
--from Blind
Pumper at the Well
Salt Publishing,
Cambridge, UK, 2008
Ingrid Wendt
and Ralph Salisbury, Akumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico, 2012. Photo: Julie Bray.
Medicine-Meeting, Hoopa,
1994
for Helen and Chad
Telling the gathering I'm Cherokee –
my
skin, like the skins
of many of them,
the skin
of soldiers who
tore
futures not
rightfully theirs
from
the genes of defeated populations –
my
answers are Father's mother's: "Sassafras tea
for
congested lungs; mint leaves
for
troubled digestion; willow bark chewed
for
pain; tobacco breathed,
into
aching ears"–-
and
words of love,
to
raise the dead
in children's dreams
of living as women and men.
--from War in the Genes
Cherry Grove
Editions, WordTech Press, 2005
Ralph
Salisbury, Eugene, Oregon, 2012. Photo: Ingrid Wendt.
Respecting
Uktena
Columbia
River Cherokee glittering monster Uktena, I recall
my
sister's husband's plowing from Mississippi loam
a
stone ball, proof of our tribe's migrating through
as
once was generally believed,
or maybe a jewel pried from Uktena's skull—
luck
for our people forever
or
curse if you lack respect.
Mt.
St. Helens erupting—Trojan nuclear plant
and
others built on seismic faults—
Uktena,
oh mighty Uktena, forgive us,
yes, we are foolishly greedy, and Trojan's our
doom's name.
--from Like
the Sun in Storm
Habit of Rainy
Nights Press, 2012
Ralph Salisbury during his U.S. Army Air Force training,
1944.
My Brother's Poem: Vietnamese War, 1969
You tell me you can not write it
yesterday's pretty village splinters and
in
your
aircraft cargo compartment ammunition/rations/med-
icines
gone an American
lies wrapped in his raincoat
strapped
to the floor of that machine generations struggled
to invent and thousands of hours of
lives went to create
the boy's belongings all he could bear
on his back packaged beside him
sunset a shimmer like
cathedral glass
a memory the instrument-panel glow
as
low as devotional candles showing
in plexiglass monsoon
screams past your face
above
the controls your own
American face.
--from Like
the Sun in Storm
Habit of Rainy
Nights Press, 2012
Rex Salisbury (left) and Ralph Salisbury playing with dogs
on the family farm, Arlington, Iowa, circa 1939. The one-room schoolhouse,
which Ralph and his siblings attended, is in the far background.
A Genesis
What
happened to sheets of carbon all night
while
under moonlit sheets I loved then dreamed?
In
dawn my hand switches on, black clouds
shoot
lightnings from the wastebasket,
and
on my desk are rectangular fields,
black
loam that I know
was growth pressed
under tons of earth
aeons before
Shakespeare—
new
growth my own rows of words, this morning seen
as
the words of men through the centuries
imprinting themselves, for love or fear,
which
other words and sounds not words had stirred,
stirring
true lovers and readers and dinosaurs, and
before there were even leaves—
not those of
books—stirring nothing until nothing
moving with nothing
in nothing
like love created
this poem and
the next.
--from Going to the Water: Poems of a Cherokee
Heritage
Pacific House Books,
1983
Ralph Salisbury with sons Jeff and Brian, 1953. Photo: Joyce
Salisbury
Awakened by Cell Phone
Awakening,
beneath pines,
where
a border of earth
the
river dried from
gives
thanks to rain,
I hear the lovely and loving chatter
my daughter's
year-old daughter sends
through silicon
crystals
transmitted into eons of green
metamorphosed into petroleum
reborn
as plastic, and, yes, into the centuries
of
families which formed my ear.
--from Like
the Sun in Storm
Habit of Rainy
Nights Press, 2012
Ralph Salisbury
and Ingrid Wendt, Fresno, California, 1969, Photo: William Stafford.
Around the Sun, the
Alaskan Oil-Spill
Space-capsule-shape
globules of oil
re-entering
the atmosphere
in
the nostrils of terns,
an ocean of air between words'
furthest surges and
home,
I say a tern may
return,
eons from its final
breath,
and
smother some other creature—
and
I say my cells may return,
eons
from poems:
which say each tern
is sacred,
its flesh to become
new life,
to go on sustaining
lives;
which
say that oil—
formed
from the dead—is sacred,
not
to be wasted or used
to gratify greed;
which
say, with all the breath a mind can hold,
each
moment of life is sacred,
and
Timelessness and Death.
--from Rainbows of Stone,
University of
Arizona Press, 2000
Ralph's older brother Ray on tractor. Salisbury family farm,
Arlington, Iowa, circa 1936.