"pale, absorbent fields of paper": A blackboard on Geoffrey Brock's "Family History: Oct. 15, 1848"

The fall semester has started, so it's time for another blackboard. This is from my Contemporary Poetry course this morning. As an introduction to the course, we discussed a poem by Geoffrey Brock from his book Voices Bright Flags, which we will be discussing for the next two weeks.

Family History: Oct. 15, 1848

Geoffrey Brock, Voices Bright Flags, 58

The instruments were various:

the hollow pens that spilled their inks

on pale, absorbent fields of paper;

the notion that land belongs to men;

apologetic rhetoric

("the force of circumstance" and "hard

necessity"); the trade in rum

and viruses; and guns, of course;

and love: in Texas, a decade after

New Echota and the Trail of Tears,

an Alabama Cherokee

with rivers of hair and broken eyes

married a white man. He was disowned;

she fell into the pool of us and drowned.

Note from Voices Bright Flags 99:

The parenthetical quotations (which I found in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States) are from Sen. Edward Everett's explanation of his decision, in 1836, to vote to ratify the Treaty of New Echota, which authorized the forcible relocation of the Cherokee Nation from the southeast to present-day Oklahoma.

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