TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

This year, the United States of America celebrates its 250th birthday, its Semiquincentennial. On one hand, it’s a big number. None of us will live to see our 250th birthday! On the other hand, our country is young — an adolescent compared to many other countries around the world. And though the history of the U.S. is quite short, human history in this land is not. People have lived here for thousands of years.

It’s easy to romanticize and even lionize explorers and pioneers, and it’s essential to tell the truth about how we got to be where we are now, and who was displaced or eradicated — often violently — for others to call this place home. But even when humans in power today are reluctant to tell the difficult truth, the land reveals it.

This country we call ours is full of history that predates our current national culture, if we care to see and acknowledge it. I live in Ohio where, in Adams County, is the country’s largest serpent mound — an earthen effigy mound representing a snake with a curled tail. It’s an internationally known National Historic Landmark and was likely constructed by the Adena culture who shared geography with Ohio. Nearby are three burial mounds — two created by the Adena culture, which existed from 800 B.C. to 100 A.D., and one by the Fort Ancient culture, which existed from 1000 to 1650 A.D.

It’s incredible to me that less than two hours from my home in the Midwestern suburbs is an enormous ancient earthwork. But that’s the thing about history — it layers on top of itself in unexpected ways.

No matter where you live in the United States, you live on land that has long been home to Indigenous people.

Today’s poem takes us to Ancestral Puebloan structures in New Mexico, where it explores the possibilities of how we chart — and thus become part of — these many layered timelines.

Mother Church No. 3
by Robin Coste Lewis

                                                            Kin Kletso/Yellow House
                                        Chaco Canyon, San Juan County, New Mexico
                                                      Anasazi Ruins, AD 1125-1130

                                                                                                                                             for Henri, at 2

You step down into the Flat World
Then ask me to say it, to explain

How our name can mean both ancestor
And enemy.  Your body begins in four directions.

Here, one calendar takes eighteen years. 
I am three. One day is an eyelash.

Your body is a segment of prehistoric road,
A buried stairwell with only the top stair obvious.

We are alluvial, obsidian. 
Sometimes the ground swells

With disappointment; sometimes we know our mountains
Will be renamed after foreign saints.

We sing nine-hundred-year-old hymns
That instruct us in how to sit still

For forty-nine years
Through a fifty-year drought. 

We climb down through the hole anyway, 
And agree to the arrangement.

"Mother Church No. 3" by Robin Coste Lewis from VOYAGE OF THE SABLE VENUS by Robin Coste Lewis © 2015 by Robin Coste Lewis, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.