Acadia

by James Bolner, Sr.

We used to sit at dusk
On wide porches,
Listening to the language of our fathers,
While from the swamp,
From the vita of myriadcolored mossgrasswater,
The locustsound pierced our very hearts.

Then one morning
We heard their steel saws in the swamp,
Cutting the ancient cypresses,
It had started--
Not violently, as  rumbling tank advances,
But subtlety, profoundly, irrevocably--
In the cranking of a two cylinder gasoline motor.
(First the slimy hemp coiled tightly,
Then pulled abruptly--a sputter--
And the language was mortally wounded.)

Perhaps the saddest thing about the new ones
Was their working on Sunday,
And on Saturday afternoon.

They hauled the cypresses with trucks,
Driven by men who spoke American,
They killed our mother tongue.

Our fathers were brought here by THEIR fathers.
We never wanted to come here.
But once we arrived,
We digested the swampland into ourselves,
And one dusk unknown generations later
We were loving each grain, each drop, each leaf, each individual
    particle of Acadia with the passionate and assuaging love
    that we must have for the land.

But it is dying--
The language is dying.
Today, when the people go into the town,
They are sometimes guilty of trying to stop loving it.

---James Bolner, Sr.
(approximately 1957)