Psalms of Hiawatha

By B Shawn Clark

July 16, 2019

Carl Sandburg Home

Flat Rock, North Carolina

The man stood with quiet rectitude peering above a flat rock into the dense forest beyond.  Here the great poet and biographer, who used to live at the farm just up the hill would retreat to a spot far enough from the goat pens and farming equipment to partake of a silence unperturbed by sounds inspired by humans, yet pregnant with the subtle voices of nothingness. Whispers made from the wind breathing breathlessly through the branches upon which inhabitants of the forest were perched sang their songs that the man could almost fathom – but not quite, given the limitations imposed by his restless mind.

Every now and again humans were urged by the great poet who used to wander through these woods to linger at a big flat rock such as this one, pausing for a moment to silently ask themselves three questions:  

Where have I been?

Where am I going? 

Who am I?

This the man did, standing there at the big flat rock, listening intently to the nothingness in the air, waiting for a sign to emerge from the wilderness still obtaining in this same spot where the great poet engaged in his own musings seven decades thence.  This lasted for about three minutes before a distant sound far, far away took hold, gradually building in momentum, then fading away.  About the instant he discerned that the sound he was hearing came from the engines of a human-made aircraft high in the sky, a more immediate, insistent protest against the quiet whispers of the forest blasted forth.

It was from the engine of a nearby lawn mower.  

The man retreated into the relative peace and quiet of his mind.

I suppose two of the questions I am supposed to ask myself have been answered, he thought to himself.  I have been on quite a few airplanes taking me to faraway places, and I have a pretty good idea of my itinerary, in the immediate future, at least.   

But as for that last question . . .

His thought trailed off, melding with the rest of the nothingness that enveloped him once the lawn mower ceased its infernal rumblings.  He had, indeed, purposefully sent himself on previous journeys and would embark on those yet to come, with the singular intent of confronting that last question that had as yet remained unanswered.

He sought true enlightenment – an ideal as elusive as the wisps of thought dissipating into the nothingness that was the forest, there teeming with life surrounding him, yet eluding his mind’s grasp. Inhuman sounds of nothingness gave way to a soft crunching noise made by his boots crushing the brittle leaves and twigs underfoot as he made his way along the path, his senses trained upon a more keen discernment of the nothingness with as much attention his meager resources could allow without stumbling along the path that marked his journey, well worn by the great poet who, as circumstances would have it, also made music.  

The man paused for a moment just a short distance down the hill from the flat rock where a little bridge would take him onward upon his journey.  A gaggle of tree stumps appeared within his field of vision just off to the side of the trail.  They looked to him more as a writing desk nestled among a natural, open-air study that a poet might see as such – at least it did to him.  

He put them to just such a purpose as his mind imagined, as if to breathe life into a scene as seen in his mind’s eye: a poet’s writing desk and study, anthropomorphically turning an act of nature into an act, not so much of human intervention, but of a natural selection of the place he would find himself to be, just for a short while at least.

There was no trace of sounds of machines in the sky or upon the earth as he sat there at his desk, studying all that surrounded him, in sight and in sound.  The creek babbled its babbling nonsense that humans could not fathom as the sounds of life-giving fluidity caressed the hard surfaces that channeled its constant movement towards an inevitable destination below, over and then through all of the living things in the world.

A bird voiced her message many humans thought of as a song, but which more likely was a call of alarm to her usual companions there in the wood to beware of yet another intrusion by one of THEM: The two-legged creatures they instinctively knew posed a threat to their very existence.   

She soon fell silent, leaving the man to focus on the sounds that to the humans would be regarded as sounds of nothingness echoing through a vacuous place.

There at his desk, he replied:  

QUIET SONG

Be still.

Listen 

only to your breath,

then the breath 

of the wind

rustling leaves

of trees.

Hear the whistle

sharp and melodic,

calling out to you,

calling your name

beckoning you

to come closer.

Be still.

Listen.

Hear things.

Things 

that have been

silent 

to you.

Be still.

Listen.

Then hear.

July 17, 2019

Shenandoah National Park

Shenandoah Valley, Virginia

Outside the lodge situated atop a hill, visitors, guests and workers came, bustling to and fro.  The man had been among them, but then found himself standing stock still, marveling at the human intrusion of it all.  The people seemed oblivious to the majesty of nature that was the very thing that ostensibly drew them there in the first place.

They were surrounded by that which brought them to this place, standing like silent sentinels, keeping a wary eye on the creatures that could turn on them at any moment.  

He had not noticed one tree in particular that was obscured by lack of any official attention paid to her – an oddity as out of place as the shape of her trunk, bending less than five feet up the trunk from the ground at an almost perfect 90 degree angle before shooting straight up, extending her limb up to the sky – the direction towards which she would normally be expected to grow.  

A fellow visitor walked towards him, standing at his side for a moment, also regarding the elbow-like protrusion from the ancient tree, as if growing a human limb, frozen in place over time in a salute to passersby.  

“An acquaintance of mine who studies such things told me that the Indians would bend trees like this on purpose as markers along a path.  The elbow pointed in the right direction along the trail,” said the traveler.

“Seems odd that there is no sign or marker here to tell that story, especially with this tree being so prominent, right here next to the lodge where there are so many people walking right past it every day,” said the man.  “Surely there will be some mention of it in the visitor’s center.  Maybe they will have a book about the history of the indigenous peoples that lived in the Shenandoah Valley and their ways, including the bent tree legend.”

There wasn’t.

When he hiked to the visitor’s center, he found nothing.  No trace of the Red Man was left by the White ones who seemed intent on blotting out all memory of those people who first arrived in this place, those who had built a life for themselves alongside the trees and bison and deer.  At first when the Europeans came, the bounty of the place was peacefully shared and made even more bountiful by all of the labors of the humans living in the valley.

But then a less peaceful variant invaded the valley.  They were not refugees or settlers.  They were conquerors.  

They were bent themselves on conquest and enslavement of the natural world as well as her human allies.  Native peoples to the south of the valley were enlisted in a form of ethnic cleansing of the Shenantoa perpetrated by a fierce tribe of peoples who had been corrupted by greed and seduced by shiny things that had been shown to them by the pink-skinned invaders from far away.  Before the pink skins came, there was no concept that one human could “own” the land, much less have dominion over another human being. 

“You cannot own your mother,” they would have told the pinks – if there were such words in their native tongue.  

The idea of humans having dominion over the rest of nature must have seemed, well, unnatural to the peoples who lived here, those who previously believed they were just part of many other living things in a shared commons.  Now they were told that if they delivered another human from another tribe, they would receive gifts of the shiny things they had grown to adore. 

Better yet, they would be given shiny things to hold the firewater that they began to love even more than the freedom of their fellows that they traded to the pinks so readily – even eagerly.  Little did they know they were ultimately trading away their own freedom in the bargain.  

As the man walked along the trail, he now could see so clearly that the way had been marked along that very same pathway by ancient trees pointing in the same direction, back towards the first sentinel tree back at the lodge.  

Centuries before, the peoples of this valley that still bears their name had bent these trees not to their will, but to show the way along a path they should follow.  They were long gone now, the sounds of their voices absorbed into the trees that had guided them, and the mountains that still echoed their names throughout the ages.  

The man paused for a moment at the top of a hill not far from Lewis Spring.  The space where he stood had been cleared many years ago, as had others he had seen where indigenous peoples were known to have built their wigwams or thatched houses.  

Again, there were no markers.  There were no tributes.

He lent an ear and listened intently to the wind and the trees singing their own songs.  He closed his eyes, transporting himself to a time 400 years ago when those same songs could be heard at this very spot.

Then came the clamoring sound of children to break the spell.  

They were being led by their scoutmaster.

“Which way to Flat Rock?” asked the scoutmaster.

The man, who had never in his conscious mind been to this place in his entire life, silently pointed in the direction that the children and their leader were heading.  “Hi, hiker!” a little boy called down to the man, giving a quick wave of his hand as he followed the other children along the path.  

The man waited for the din of the throng to fade into a distant murmur before scaling up the rest of the way to the ridge where the path had taken the young adventurers to their destination.  He began to listen anew for more messages in the trees left by the ancient ones, but what he heard instead was the heavy breathing of a man and two of his young charges.

They were trying to catch up to the others.  

“They went that way,” he told them before they could catch their breaths enough to ask.  “Just follow the dull roar of restless children in the distance, and you will find the place you are looking for.”  

They could see no bent trees to show them the way.

July 29, 2019

Nut Hatch Haven

Mount Meenagha

Ellenville, New York

He stood in a clearing, surrounded by a forest on a spot not far from a tree that looked to him to have been bent in the fashion of the lost tribe of the Shenantoa.  He again listened intently, waiting for the mountain upon which he stood to speak to him.  But there was an eerie silence that morning, as if the creatures who inhabited this place had receded, seeking refuge from some unseen predator, or were secreted in the underbrush or trees, holding their tongues along with their breath for fear of being detected.  

The outward silence gave way to the voice of the historian he met a few days ago in Gardiner, whose words echoed within the confines of his skull.  The historian recounted the tale of a man who said that as a boy he had learned to speak the language of the Esopus, a tribe of indigenous peoples, now extinct, with whom he lived for a short while.

The man who related this tale was five years old at the time he was taken captive, along with his mother and two younger brothers, 356 years in the past.

The historian revealed that that boy was the man’s ancestor.  

The words spoken by his ancestor had long since been forgotten, as had, for the most part, the peoples who had invented them.  But they have been described as having great beauty, strength and flexibility, possessing the power to encompass a whole sentence in a single word. 

Remnants of these words persist in place names in the Hudson Valley such as Kerhonkson and Esopus itself.     

Indeed, the clearing where he stood, training his ears in a vain effort to detect the whispers of ancient voices, was near Kerhonkson, the place where his ancestor lived among the Esopus, speaking their words for the last time.

What songs they sang with those words are unknown except to the trees that bore witness to those songs and to the slaughter of the Esopus by those who had sought to silence their voices and extinguish their words for all time.

But among the Esopus the man’s ancestor found that his captors had no corresponding interest in silencing the voices of those whom they apparently thought of as guests more so than prisoners, as they were free to sing their hymns, ironically enough taken from the 137^th Psalms:

Thou ruined Salem, to our eyes

Each day in sad remembrance we rise

Should we cease to feel thy wrongs

Lost be our joy and mute our tongues

This song, written in words made thousands of years ago, have been preserved in notations made in bibles that could be found in the places of worship of those who came to live among the Esopus, if only for a short while, in that place where the tongues of the Esopus were muted.  

Speaking in that place where the hymnals were kept sacred, a man of the cloth paid tribute to their song in eulogy:

The Esopus will unite her voice with the Shat-a-Muck, and the music of many waters shall peal the requiem of departed nations.

B Shawn Clark is an attorney-turned author who writes from a secluded area in the seaside town of Englewood, Florida, where he recently survived a series of violent hurricanes that were foretold in his Cli-Fi novel, 20/20. For more information about his background and works in progress please refer to his author website at www.BShawnClark.com or feel free to read some of his SubStack posts at https://zenmanship.substack.com/publish/posts.