Dawn on the East River
The summer solstice
No blue
A clouded sky
A pale white sun
93 million miles away
Glowing
Gray
I
In bed
In a fourteenth-floor hospital room
My hand reaches
Touchs the window
Glass warm to my palm__
Below The East River flows fast south
Four knots with the flush
Of Long Island Sound tide
Twice daily
In out in out
North South
As the estuary has flowed twice daily
Since the melting of the Great Glacier
15000 years ago__
Forming Long Island to Montauk
Block Island, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vinyard, Nantucket__
Their original names
Manisses, Paumanok, Pawtuxet, Noepe, Nontoke
Lenape for the East River
Pawkatuck
Their length of land
Naragansett to the Delaware Bay.
Lenapehoking
A land of plenty
Lenni Lenape
“We the people’ numbered 50,000
Living on oysters, beans, corn, fish, and the fruits
The land of plenty
Four hundred years ago___
Now
Today
June 22, 2023
Rita delivers my breakfast
Eggs, potato fritter, sausages, black coffee
She Jamaican
African blood
Her smile lights my life
Her thirteen year-old son
Name Michael
Day six in the hospital__
On Manhattah
The Island of Hills
Or
Manahactanienk
The Place Of Intoxication__
Later
5:46PM
Commuter ferries speed North with the tide South
Fast Tugboats toil South against the tide
On the Pawkatucket___
Gulls fly freely overhead
I mistake them for helicopters
My eyesight not 20/20
But my eyes strip away the apartment blocks
Across the river on Roosevelt Island
Centuries to before the Dutch came to Manhattaw___
Twenty years later
Only 3000 Lenape
In all of Lenapehoking
The Land of Plenty lost to them__
Their canoes once plied the East River___
Now jet skis, the Circle Line, party boats, and sumptuous yachts
Champagne and wine drunk off Manhattah
The Place of Intoxication__
This morning
I drink black coffee
Hospital coffee
Bleech___
Me
Banned from all spirits
My destiny either sober or dead
I chose Life___
My clan lived on the other side of Earth
Two Wives, five children, two grandchildren
Sri Racha, Thailand
On the Gulf of Siam
Ao Sayam
Now night in Sri Racha
A twenty-three hour flight away
The other side of here__
The world turns
West to the night
Same as during the Forever of the Great Glacier
The drowning of Atlantis
15000 years ago to now
And into eternity
And I turn with it
My hand against the window
Warm from the setting sun of forever___
Over Pawkatuck
Lenapehoking
A land of plenty
Forever here
In our hearts and souls___
