Assassination Nation

On the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1968 

 

by Robert Bensen 

 

Whoever we might have been, 

whatever grief or fury we might have shared 

were lost when the mighty arm 

that God and the weight room gave him 

brought down, I believe 

a set of knuckles to open my skull 

to the complicity of my complexion 

and turn us, like the twilight, black and white. 

 

A half-hour later: dizziness, nausea, 

a swarm of psychedelic lights. 

The brain trauma specialist 

asked if I always sweat like this. 

 —Yes, I said, yes, yes, 

I always sweat like this. 

 

Police stacked the table with album after album of mug shots, 

thumbnails of beautiful black males, growing older, somewhere, maybe. 

Maybe my main mugger-man in there, or the brothers who shot up the neighborhood 

night after night I lay sweating bullets on the floor, that summer the night 

one of their grandmothers took a slug through her picture window into her heart. 

 

None of those faces belonged above the arm 

I can still see silhouetted against the cool dusk of April 4, 1968, 

before it descended like the wrath of Jehovah 

who smote the hard, hard hearts of the children 

all the harder because they were his children. 

—Officer, I said, I never saw the man’s face. 

Cop thinks —This guy’s a waste. 

But I had seen the heraldry of race, an arm raised, 

and locked in the fist, a club, a mace— 

trapped in this row after row, page after page 

of sullen faces. Many frames, one rage. 

I wonder: could he pick out of a college yearbook, 

or a line-up of my entire despiséd race, 

me, whose head got in the way of his fist? 

Did this startled face serve in place of him 

who cocked the hammer and aimed the rifle 

and pulled the trigger that fired the bullet

 

that flew through Memphis 

that lovely April afternoon, the bullet 

that has been flying for half a century, 

bullet flying still— 

would this one do, who did nothing to stop it, 

nothing whatever to stop it, 

 

this one who’ll never undo the nothing he did 

with the nothing he wouldn’t do, if he could. 

 

First published in Piltdown Review. 

Copyright © Robert Bensen. All rights reserved. 

Robert Bensen is a poet, essayist, teacher, editor, and publisher in Upstate New York. Most recent among six collections of poetry are Before and Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems (Bright Hill Press). Poetry and literary essays have appeared in AGNI, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Berfrois, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, La presa, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. He has edited anthologies of Native American and Caribbean literature, and authored a bibliographic study, American Indian and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood Studies, at Oxford University Press online. His writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, the State of New York, Illinois Arts Council, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and others. From 1978 to 2017, he was Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College (Oneonta NY). He also taught at Parkland College and SUNY Oneonta, and conducted community workshops, including the Red Herring Workshop (Urbana IL) and the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill Press and Literary Center (Treadwell NY). He is the founding editor of two literary presses, the Red Herring Press and Woodland Arts Editions. robertbensen.com

Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press)

By Robert Bensen 

 

The recent discoveries of over 1,000 Indigenous children’s graves near boarding and residential schools are the latest developments in the story of assimilative, arguably genocidal education in the U.S. and Canada. In poetry, fiction, and memoir, the boarding school experience is represented in Children of the Dragonfly, the first anthology of Indian literature devoted to Indian child education and welfare. The anthology also includes literature on adoption and foster care, when some 35 percent of Indian children were raised in non-Indian settings during the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the U.S. crisis that led to passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. Dragonfly is an ancient spirit in the Zuni story that saves two abandoned children and restores them to their people. That spirit is infused in the literature collected in Children of the Dragonfly.

 

Boarding schools were created to assimilate Indian children to the white world, which required the loss of cultural traditions. The literature tells us, however, that children kept their stories and practices as much as they could. U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” (1994) retells the ancient creation story in the story of Johnny and Lila. Together they endured the rigors and privations of boarding school, but afterward went their separate ways. Johnny joined the army. Lila worked at Dairy Queen and cleaned houses until she entered the story that had been her refuge at school. She married one of the stars and lived in the Sky World, where she was sure “she could find love in a place that did not know the disturbance of death.”

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Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

The University of Arizona Press

Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press)

Native American children have long been subject to removal from their homes for placement in residential schools and, more recently, in foster or adoptive homes. The governments of both the United States and Canada, having reduced Native nations to the legal status of dependent children, historically have asserted a surrogate parentalism over Native children themselves.

Children of the Dragonfly, edited by Robert Bensen, is the first anthology to document this struggle for cultural survival on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Through autobiography and interviews, fiction and traditional tales, official transcripts and poetry, these voices— Seneca, Cherokee, Mohawk, Navajo, and many others— weave powerful accounts of struggle and loss into a moving testimony to perseverance and survival. 

Invoking the dragonfly spirit of Zuni legend who helps children restore a way of life that has been taken from them, the anthology explores the breadth of the conflict about Native childhood.

Included are works of contemporary authors Joy Harjo, Luci Tapahonso, and others; classic writers Zitkala-Sa and E. Pauline Johnson; and contributions from twenty important new writers as well. They take readers from the boarding school movement of the 1870s to the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 in the United States. They also spotlight the tragic consequences of racist practices such as the suppression of Indian identity in government schools and the campaign against Indian childbearing through involuntary sterilization.

CONTENTS
Part 1. Traditional Stories and Lives
Severt Young Bear (Lakota) and R. D. Theisz, To Say "Child"
Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Sioux), The Toad and the Boy
Delia Oshogay (Chippewa), Oshkikwe's Baby
Michele Dean Stock (Seneca), The Seven Dancers
Mary Ulmer Chiltoskey (Cherokee), Goldilocks Thereafter
Marietta Brady (Navajo), Two Stories

Part 2. Boarding and Residential Schools
Embe (Marianna Burgess), from Stiya: or, a Carlisle Indian Girl at Home
Black Bear (Blackfeet), Who Am I?
E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), As It Was in the Beginning
Lee Maracle (Stoh:lo), Black Robes
Gordon D. Henry, Jr. (White Earth Chippewa), The Prisoner of Haiku
Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), The Snakeman
Joy Harjo (Muskogee), The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

Part 3. Child Welfare and Health Services
Problems That American Indian Families Face in Raising Their Children, United States Senate, April 8 and 9, 1974
Mary TallMountain (Athabaskan), Five Poems
Virginia Woolfclan, Missing Sister
Lela Northcross Wakely (Potawatomi/Kickapoo), Indian Health
Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), from Indian Killer
Milton Lee (Cheyenne River Sioux) and Jamie Lee, The Search for Indian

Part 4. Children of the Dragonfly
Peter Cuch (Ute), I Wonder What the Car Looked Like
S. L. Wilde (Anishnaabe), A Letter to My Grandmother
Eric Gansworth (Onondaga), It Goes Something Like This
Kimberly Roppolo (Cherokee/Choctaw/Creek), Breeds and Outlaws
Phil Young (Cherokee) and Robert Bensen, Wetumka
Lawrence Sampson (Delaware/Eastern Band Cherokee), The Long Road Home
Beverley McKiver (Ojibway), When the Heron Speaks
Joyce carlEtta Mandrake (White Earth Chippewa), Memory Lane Is the Next Street Over
Alan Michelson (Mohawk), Lost Tribe
Patricia Aqiimuk Paul (Inupiaq), The Connection
Terra Trevor (Cherokee/Delaware/Seneca), Pushing up the Sky
Annalee Lucia Bensen (Mohegan/Cherokee), Two Dragonfly Dream Songs

Golden Eagles over Franklin Mountain

by Robert Bensen

On Oct. 25, 2018, we counted 128 Golden Eagles, a single-day record for eastern North America. The previous single-day high was 71 (Nov. 11, 2015) so the magnitude of this big day cannot be overstated. The reason for this Golden Eagle push two weeks before the traditional migration peak, is unknown.  

                                                            —Andy Mason, Franklin Mountain Hawkwatch 2018 Report

The scaffold bristled with digital Yashicas clamped on scopes

and monopods strutting in khaki and camouflage, as a flock

of hawk-watchers scanned quadrants of sky from Otego 

to the peaks where the Susquehanna swerves into the valley, and east.

I stood by, naked eye aswarm with floaters the one,

the other useless that magnifies and smears every human face.

Peter, half-felled by flu, and Becky tallied the count 

and helped the dozen-some visitors identify specks 

that could be buzzard, or goshawk, or harrier, or sharp-shinned

or rough-legged or Cooper’s or red-tailed hawks, or merlin, falcon,

kite or kestrel, among twenty-nine listed, including Unknown Raptors, 

hoping for Goldens riding the polar stream from Canada, or, better, one

gliding low and hungry on a hunt.  I couldn’t see diddle.

And it seemed weird to me to have the drum, but to my hand ungloved 

the skin felt warm and taut.  So I slipped away and up the path,

deer-silent for the spring of thatch underfoot.

I dug my heels in and labored up the grade, paused

to catch a breath at the hill’s brow, midway through the field                           

walled in by limb-laced fir and hardwood, when a shape or shadow rose—no, 

an enormous bird rose above the brim and—Wait! I yelled and I swear

                                                                                                                        

it gave pause mid-air while bone-chilled I fumbled the drum,

and out of a cloud of sage-smoke started a roll of thunder

that closed in, closed fast and passed, then the song brought

a line of thunders helping the verse find drafts and currents 

to ride and sign God-knows-what to the bird, white flame-tongued

wings that skimmed the tree-rim, gliding so slowly with the song

that so tethered the two of us it seemed the wall of trees revolved

the way between the potter’s thumb and fingers the new bowl turns.

We shared the easy slip of air around the bowl of circled trees.

Once around, his flight feathers splayed, trimmed then splayed,

eyes holding steady gaze, with each lift of song a fresh wind.  A quick

turn of his head and he vanished.  Who’d not be at first forlorn? 

But filled with that glory who’d mourn or sorrow for long

or deny he’d gone to let the others of his kind know,

ready for passage through this valley to the Catskills, that here,

here someone had kept the song the eagles gave so long ago: 

Wanbli gleska, naha anunca, heya a uh chun kay.

Mea trocha heya anpetu wawakeay:  

“Golden eagles, Spotted eagles, the first to fly with the dawn,

come see this one trying to become a human being, come see.”

So they did and were counted: one-hundred twenty-eight strong. 

© Robert Bensen. All rights. Reserved.

www.robertbensen.com

Robert Bensen has published six collections of poetry, including Orenoque, Wetumka and; Other Poems, and Before. His work has earned an NEA poetry fellowship, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Harvard Summer Poetry Prize, and Illinois Arts Council and NY State Council on the Arts awards. His scholarship in the Caribbean and Native America has produced essays, studies, and editions, won fellowships from the NEH and Newberry Library, and led to teaching in St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. He is the editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Hartwick College (1978-2017).  He teaches at SUNY-Oneonta, and conducts a poetry workshop at Bright Hill Literary Center, Treadwell.

Art Works

by Robert Bensen

            Sara Bates, “Honoring Circle” (sculpture)

            1

            Before a shop built downtown sealed over a spring and a little creek,

excavation turned up the bones of a man, his pipe and some shards of clay

            that came from this embankment above the Susquehanna—

clay that made the brick that made the shop that hides the creek

            that flows through pipe that’s made with clay that made the pipe they dug

beside the man they found not long ago, long after he had turned to clay.

            2

If spirit lives in everything and everything in spirit

            then the young woman with a virus raging in the head

who has fallen asleep beside Sarah's “Honoring Circle” while the rest write

            may have dreamed herself one day as pleasant as this

beside a pretty little creek above a bluff and drank from its talkative source

            in the warmth of a complicated sun, an agitated sun

flaring with seeds and pods and leaves and shells and petals,

            a composed sun from whose center the crossed roads carry

what they always carry down their seven shining paths

            until the red sun of evening stripes her face

and she flutters awake to find herself alone

            with this work, this disk of gifts on the floor, walk about

and wonder what on earth she saw in it, and what she sees. 

 An excerpt from Before by Robert Bensen

© Robert Bensen. All rights. Reserved.

Robert Bensen has published six collections of poetry, including Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems, and Before. His work has earned an NEA poetry fellowship, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Harvard Summer Poetry Prize, and Illinois Arts Council and NY State Council on the Arts awards. His scholarship in the Caribbean and Native America has produced essays, studies, and editions, won fellowships from the NEH and Newberry Library, and led to teaching in St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. He is the editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Hartwick College (1978-2017).  He teaches at SUNY-Oneonta, and conducts a poetry workshop at Bright Hill Literary Center, Treadwell.

www.robertbensen.com

Orenoque,Wetumka, and Other Poems

by Robert Bensen

Blacksnake at the Iroquois Festival                                    

We set three paper plates in the grass

between the picnic tents and ravine at the wood's edge.

I broke our daughter's fried bread, murmuring thanks.

Steam uncoiled, brushed my hand

and branched along some shifty breeze.

A handful of Mohawk kids scooped polliwogs

in cups from the concession, their family's current stand.

They flocked around a lean, sweat-beaded young man,

who drew a hoop of writhing snake from the reeds,

a red blossom where he'd sliced the head off. 

"You know this snake?" he called across the ravine. 

"Can't say I do," I said.  "But why risk it with them?" 

Past the woods we couldn't see a lumbering freight

shake the trees and hoot some vestige of its victory. 

Our girl asked to touch the snake.  I carried her over.

She smoothed its patches of tweedy, irridescent black. 

"She's more brave than you," the boy in a Barney shirt

needled his brother.  "You were right," I said again,

"not to take a chance.  Not with them." 

But he, astonished at the drive in that headless spine,

roped it over his arm again and again.

The kids packed behind him when he crossed the knoll

to find the museum's naturalist.  He scanned the faces

of milling visitors suddenly hushed at this apparition

from some world where men strode bare-chested out of the wood

wearing snakes on their arms.  He'd hoped the white man

with the curious girl had known something final.

Well, back in the sluice, a deathmask stared

down narrow, trackless halls of reeds, 

while in the tents a woman beaded lightning down my sleeve.

And now, through apple leaves, as dawn pales blue

the hood of the moon's last milky eye,

I'm after sliding an arm around my sleeping girl,

who's of another mind:  she squiggles down,

feet perched on my wrist, poised to chase or be chased

around the circle we make.  Soon must come her dream

of another life she has to run through one more time.

What Lightning Spoke                                          

            1

The island that could have claimed my life refrained,

returned it with a mouthful of dirt and a shirtful of wind.

Later a Rastaman shook his locks at me and my plate of curried goat,

shouting, "One day you will be shot!"  Though I said I thought not,

I caught my breath and leapt from one frame of this life to another. 

Once the Channahon swept me in a hole below a dam. 

I drank the river dry.  Now the river flows inside.

Makoce sica, land that gives back nothing, wanted my bones

to scatter in its red clay, flecked with saurians and Sioux.

I echoed down its caverns till my arms fledged, and I flew.

The Colorado wind that spills down the spine of the continent

tried to kite me into the gutted Glory Hole, but I bent

and took root at the rim, and let the teeth of the wind

comb snakes from the snarls in my hair.

Water, earth, air:  their tendered deaths

caught in me like tinder—beneath this flesh is fire. 

            2

Begin again in silence. 

Out of nowhere, lightning and what lightning spoke;

spike and decay.  Echo.

It curtained the road, a tree of light hung from the root.

The boy I was, was walking with his sack of newsprint blurring in the rain.

The lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming,

its rivers and rivulets flooding me with one idea:

in plain air, power makes infinite ways.

I bolted after its afterimage.  I swarmed through its fading cage.

No one home would mind a feverish child's tale,

so I retold it, next blue day, to a lone white feather of a cloud

that bloomed and boiled its furious head over the rooftops.

Maybe it was something I'd said, maybe just weather.

But sure some eminence had graved itself in my eyes' twin caves,

had scorched there the smoking claw of a thundergod.

I close my eyes and sketch, against the curtain of blood,

that first light, its descent, its flickering net of tongues.

At the time, there's only a lightening, a lift

like waking at last, already vaulting toward the zig-zag stars.

And ever after, for the record, its volleys echo

in the ear’s taut drum, down the stunned alleys of the head,

its signature chars the flesh of cloven oaks,

its shaft, drawn through the bow that arcs the valley,

will pierce the heart’s racing chambers it will pace. 

Copyright © Robert Bensen. All rights reserved.

"What Lightning Spoke" was first published in Pivot Magazine, and Blacksnake at the Iroquois Festival was first published in Tamaqua.

Hartwick College Professor of English Robert Bensen has released a new collection of poems titled Orenoque,Wetumka, and Other Poems, in collaboration with Professor of Art Phil Young, whose artwork is featured on the cover. 

The poems in Orenoque, Wetumka, occupy the borderlands between Euro-America and Native America, between now and then, between the seen and unseen. "The space between millennia was thin as water" in the reflection of the mangrove swamp in the opening poem, "Isis at Caroni." The poem invites the reader to get lost in the swamp: "the Indian guide Nanan lost us/with every turn of his wrist down every channel" that leads to the breath-taking, timeless world of the scarlet ibis. The poems negotiate the mazes of natural and human history to reveal the hidden and unknown, as in "What Lightning Spoke:"  "The lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming, / its rivers and rivulets flooding me with one idea: / in plain air, power makes infinite ways." "Orenoque" is set in the labyrinthine Orinoco River of Venezuela during the rapacious 16^th-Century explorations for El Dorado, and the late 1990s exploring for remnants of that ancient world. "Wetumka" weaves an ancient Zuni migration story with that of a Cherokee artist recovering his family scattered along and long after the Trail of Tears.

Bensen's poems have been collected in five books and published in journals from the U.S., U.K., West Indies, and Asia, as well as in African-American and Native American journals.  His work has earned a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the 1996 Robert Penn Warren Award.  He has written numerous essays on Caribbean and Native American literature, and edited several anthologies of those literatures, most recently Children of the Dragonfly (U. of Arizona Press). His poetry has been shown in eight exhibitions with photographs by Charles Bremer, in galleries that include the Bright Hill Literary Center and the National Museum of Dance, Saratoga Springs, NY.  He taught writing and literature and directed the writing programs at Hartwick College.  www.robertbensen.com