The Disappearance of the Duwamish Salmon
By Duane Niatum
How long have they laid buried
in the sludge and grime of industry
erasing the river's breath
and almost erasing the Duwamish people
who once paddled their canoes down
its current swift as the wing of kingfisher?
Walking beside the river in 2009 you can
still hear the dreams and laughter
of children picking serviceberry
with their grandmother teasing a crow
stealing berries from her basket.
You might glimpse ancestral villages,
longhouses yards from the riverbank
before settlers burned them to the ground ,
drove the small tribe to the city's outskirts.
Seattle, too easily the age slipped a false-face
mask on you, a glass and concrete fashion cone
to give roaches the run of skyscrapers.
Although an alien in Salish country,
you were destined to become Raven's cousin,
Killer Whale's distant, ambivalent friend,
the many-mountains'-on-both-sides
adopted daughter when just an agate cut
from volcano and sea.
Seattle, my old salmonberry moon under a sky
as light as a tossed net, who remains,
leaping with salmon for old emotions?
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Paul went to the office for a full day on Thursday for the first time since the pandemic started -- they were having an employee event with lots of free food -- so I had the house to myself while I packed up the remaining DVD cases in the house to give to a Freecycler and rearranged the basement bookshelves to try to get some sense of how many books we're actually trying to keep.
I had my usual Thursday night fangirl chat, around which I watched this week's She-Hulk (very enjoyable, especially the guest star and the Wolverine-hands makeup brushes) and Interview with the Vampire (clever, sumptuous, extremely sexy, well acted, a huge improvement on the movie). Salmon in the stream, jumping the dam, and moving through the fish ladder at the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery:
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