1
Just saying your name is enough
Pocahontas.
A name that means more than ordinary love
can promise;
More than the solace that every human craves,
Seeks in the lonely cities,
The concrete streets of solitude.
The midnight streets of London, New York, Paris.
Your sanitized image, splashed over cinema screens,
Has done you a great disservice.
2
The forests you roamed when a child are not
even named
On the memory maps we draw with the aid of
dreams
Invoking a lost world deep buried beneath
plantations;
The scars from the plough; the footprints of
slaves.-
An ancestor of mine wed you, thus gaining a
status
Greater than he expected in the chronicles of
Jamestown.
But it was you who made the difference, not
John Rolfe
With his tobacco seeds, thieved from Trinidad
Under the guns of the Spanish.
Your tears brought peace, clarity, forgiveness,
When you knelt before the Chief and saved a
life.
3.
You knelt before your Chief in the forest glades,
Your tears of coexistence, of tender understanding,
Doused malicious fires - silenced guns and drums,
Brought peace throughout the short term of your
marriage
Between the stubborn English and Powhatan.
But of course the colonists could not keep faith,
They fenced in the sacred land and started conflicts
That killed not just one man, but whole families of
nations.
The London winter did for Pocahontas.
Her husband fell beneath a tomahawk blow.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 2nd. - 3rd. - 4th. - 12th. - 15th. - 16th. 2021.
I did not discover for certain that I am related, on my mother`s side of the family, to John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas. It now seems very strange to me that in my early twenties my then girlfriend was descended from John Rolfe on her father`s side of her family. I find this coincidence extraordinary.
