The Disappearance of the Duwamish Salmon

By Duane Niatum

How long have they laid buried

in the sludge and grime of industry

erasing the river's breath

and almost erasing the Duwamish people

who once paddled their canoes down

its current swift as the wing of kingfisher?

Walking beside the river in 2009 you can

still hear the dreams and laughter

of children picking serviceberry

with their grandmother teasing a crow

stealing berries from her basket.

You might glimpse ancestral villages,

longhouses yards from the riverbank

before settlers burned them to the ground ,

drove the small tribe to the city's outskirts.

Seattle, too easily the age slipped a false-face

mask on you, a glass and concrete fashion cone

to give roaches the run of skyscrapers.

Although an alien in Salish country,

you were destined to become Raven's cousin,

Killer Whale's distant, ambivalent friend,

the many-mountains'-on-both-sides

adopted daughter when just an agate cut

from volcano and sea.

Seattle, my old salmonberry moon under a sky

as light as a tossed net, who remains,

leaping with salmon for old emotions?

Copyright Credit: Duane Niatum, "The Disappearance of the Duwamish Salmon" from Earth Vowels. Copyright © 2017 by Duane Niatum. Reprinted by permission of Mongrel Empire Press.

Source: Earth Vowels (Mongrel Empire Press, 2017)