Even now, walking this city’s cobbled streets,
I am rowing to the pebbled shore.
Twenty-five years later
and I am plunging the oar
into the silver waves surging
against the aluminum canoe.
My daughter is always four-years-old
clutching the gunnels
with small square hands.
A line storm rips across the wide,
cold lake, but I am rowing her
to the pebbled shore
toward the birch forest
through the bouldered path
leading to the cabin
warming the evergreen rain.
The pebbles are a chorus of broken mouths
forever singing. They are remembrance stones
plucked silently from mass graves.
The boulders are my father’s shoulders
making water from rocks
placed beneath an ecclesiastical sun—
rocks weep and slake my thirst.
The birches are windows opening upon History.
Pine needles point me home.
No matter what else happens in my life—
old and new wars—
a sulphur horizon of ashes,
tongues falling silent
from a genocidal sky;
no matter where you put me—
in a prison for free thinkers;
no matter what you do to me—
hold a pistol to my head—
strike your truncheon—strike me dead—
know that you are powerless. Know
I will always be rowing and floating
my child towards the stones
placed upon stones
washed by waves that they,
themselves, make,
to the pebbled shore.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
P. J. Sutton holds an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. She is the winner of the George Starbuck Creative Writing Fellowship, the Snyder Prize, and a Glimmer Train award winner. She authored Pocket Gospel and the award-winning Burning My Birth Certificate. Her poetry has been featured in BAP in 2000, 2009, 2017, and in the 2013 Scribner’s 25th Anniversary edition of BAP’s The Best of the Best American Poetry. Sutton taught Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and lectured at MIT for their series, “The Pleasures of Poetry.” She is 1/4th Cherokee and grew up on Lac du Flambeau Indian Reservation.
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