Tecumseh
by: Mary Oliver
I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.
Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to
write to Washington, and even then,
whatever they said,
would you believe it? Sometimes
I would like to paint my body red and go out into
the glittering snow to die.
His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.
After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,
it was over, except
his body could not be found.
It was never found,
and you can do whatever you want with that, say
his people came in the black leaves of the night
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home down the rivers. Anyway,
this much I'm sure of: if we ever meet him, we'll know it,
he will still be
so angry.
There is a righteous anger in this poem. The wounds of the past don't disappear. As Oliver says, they hang on, persist like plastic bottles or bags, making the world unkind and ugly. Tecumseh becomes myth--disappearing and transforming--yet he is still defined/identifiable by one thing: his all-consuming anger.
Holding onto anger is not healthy. I've learned this through my hundreds of hours in therapy and counseling. Being angry at an individual doesn't really accomplish anything. The person who made you angry is probably ignorant of your feelings while you are losing sleep and developing an ulcer. Anger makes you sick.
That doesn't mean all anger is bad. People should get pissed about injustices and inequalities. We in the United States all benefit from old white men stealing land from Indigenous peoples. The economy of this country was driven by the slave trade. U. S. citizens suffer and die because they can't afford decent healthcare or proper medication. There are Holocaust deniers and white nationalists. Rich male politicians and Supreme Court Justices who want to control women's health and bodies. Homophobes who think love is something that can be legislated and controlled. Islamophobes who blame the world's evils on Muslims. Xenophobes who blame the world's evils on everyone but themselves.
The list is endless, the anger boundless.
However, I learned a long time ago that you can disagree without being disagreeable. Another way of saying this: you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Bombs don't settle disagreements--they simply lead to blood and death. Screaming and shouting don't settle disagreements, either--they just make your opposition scream and shout louder. Starting a war is easy. Building lasting peace, on the other hand, is complicated, if not impossible.
If a little Jewish girl hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam can still hope for peace and tranquility, I think we all can, as well. Anger can be a catalyst for the worst kinds of human behavior. It can also be a catalyst for goodness, kindness, understanding, and love.
In spite of everything happening in the world today, Saint Marty still believes that people are really good at heart. Unless they're Trumpers.
❤️
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