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A cradle still warm… a bubbling pot with no lid… So swiftly did
Government troops sweep down that the Cherokees hardly found
time for a last look at home.
                                                                                                                     —Marilou Awiakta

locked inside the camp    at Rattlesnake Springs    styed    unwatered
unfed    muddy    night sky star-pricked    lit by a smear of moon    David
with splinters in his hand    tracing his sore palm with his finger    tracing
the eighty-five characters    Eliza once held his aching foot    plucked a

thorn    with shells so thin    he thought they would break    his child in her
belly    she’s blanketed, snoring    curled on her side    some people with
deer-hides for beds    some the hard-packed earth    cupped in his hands,
the holy book    that he keeps in his tobacco pouch    if he had ink

for translating a psalm    he could print near the English verses    all the
words    he knows in syllabary    his words pouring down the margins    if
he had slippery elm    touch-me-nots    wild ginger for Eliza    tomorrow, if
he asks softly, meekly    if the officers permit him    to baptize his

people in the Ayuhwasi    some chance, then    for the medicine elder to
sing    carry out the old ways    help Eliza go into the waters    from wood
scraps the officers gave them    David’s converts make    rough benches
for the old, the sick    a place for preaching    hymns    holding church

inside the camp    tomorrow, if the officers let him    dip his neighbors
standing in the river    he will read a revelation    his feet planted among
mussels    who spin grit in their wet mouths    calling for the holy ghost,
the cloud of fire    he will stand    among stones tumbled smooth

Small for his age, hunger-hollowed, smudge-eyed,
                    whittled thin as a withe of oak, splint of ash,
the boy slips through the wall, through the wedge
                    of light where log warps away from log,
and runs through fields, down a wooded slope,
                    to the seeps whose place his mother told,
made him repeat, told again until words hung
                    as a map between them, a map she touched
with her hand, saying near this tree, by that stone.
                    Each day, he creeps back to the wall
and passes to her bear lettuce, pokeweed, cresses,
                    sorrels, mulberries, cattail roots,
hen-of-the-woods, tall so-cha-ni with yellow flowers,
                    food for your sick father, she tells him,
your wasting brothers. Always he scurries, darts,
                    stays low, still the soldiers catch him,
drag him into the stockade, tear off his shirt,
                    bind his hands and lash his back.
His mother washes his wounds and tells him
                    snakegrass for bleeding, and do not cry,
jimsonweed for bruises. And then she says,
                    when wolves seized the turtle,
the turtle used his wits, said he would sink fast
                    and drown if they tossed him into the river.
When they threw him, his shell struck a rock
                    and cracked. The turtle sank to the bottom.
His cracks would mend, become the orange dots
                    and lines that pattern his shell.
He fixed his eyes on the surface,
                     swam toward the least glimmer of light.