Today’s prompt is one the Robert Brewer often does near the end of a month of poetry: Take a poem from earlier in the month and remix it, revise it, recreate it. I sort of pooped out on my Pennsylvania poem half way through the month, so I am going to re-work that one today.
Our bones are made of ice and fire:
quartzite and anthracite,
and deep within our limestone soul
are vast and silent caverns.
Our ridges are furred with forests
of oak and locust, sycamore,
beech and hornbeam.
Our blood is borne in the waters
of the mighty Monongahela,
Allegheny, Susquehanna, the Ohio,
the Delaware, the Juniata.
We make our myths in the kiln and the forge,
steel and mining and the quiet industry of farms.
We honor and forget the ones who came before,
writing history as if it began
when our European ancestors
arrived to turn wilderness to profit.
This is the land of the Iroquois,
the Susquehannock, the Seneca,
the Shawnee, and the Lenape.
This is the land of Penn’s Great Experiment,
religious freedom and a rule of law
based on the councils of those whose land we stole.
We have much to atone for,
much to celebrate, much to grieve,
and much to redeem.
Mockingbird Chronicles 