By RON WELBURN
Life knows no embarrassment
than being unprepared,
caught in the rain flatfooted
before ceremonies,
nabbed in the seat of the pants
by the stealth of Coyote.
Poems by RON WELBURN
Please welcome back The Common contributor Ron Welburn.
Contents:
MARGINAL NOTE FOR HISTORICAL REVISION
“Neither Huguenot nor Timucuan gained much
from the other. The Huguenots tried to convert
the Timucuan to Protestantism. The Timucuans
taught the Huguenots to smoke tobacco.”
(Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 1976. p. 429)
In conjunction with The Poetry Coalition’s March 2019 joint programming exploring the theme “What Is It, Then, Between Us?: Poetry & Democracy,” The Common presents four weekly features this month, each addressing and extending this national—and international—conversation.
In this, our fourth installment, we offer Ron Welburn’s “Seeing in the Dark” and “Alternate Charles Ramsey” by Reginald Dwayne Betts.
By RON WELBURN
Both a painting and a tableau I conceptualized in
a feature film led to this poem, to which I connect
-ed the cover photography of selected jazz albums
and paintings by George Catlin. Colonel Guy
Johnson and Karonghyontye (Captain David Hill)
(1776) is the work of Benjamin West, an eigh-
teenth-century painter born in the Pennsylvania
colony. Better known is his William Penn’s Treaty
with the Indians (1771); but I suspect the directors
of the Daniel Day-Lewis Last of the Mohicans used
it to create the film’s opening scene, where Magua
(played by Wes Studi) steps out of the shadows.
Deepest shadow.
Faces of warrior-counsel pronounce
Sinister reckonings
In hearts shaped to recall only our treacherous deeds.
New Poems by our Contributors
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews RON WELBURN
Ron Welburn is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches American Literature, Native American Literature, and American Studies. His ancestors include Gingaskin and Assateague from the Delmarva Peninsula, Cherokee, Lenape, and African American. Professor Welburn received a B.A. in both Psychology and English from Lincoln University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University.His research and teaching interests include ethnohistory of eastern Native America, cultural studies, and jazz studies. S. Tremaine Nelson spoke with Ron over the phone about poetry, New York City, and two authors whom they both very much admire, Ralph Ellison and Leslie Marmon Silko. Ron’s poems “Seeing in the Dark” and “When You Know a Hard Sky” appear in Issue 06 of The Common.
By RON WELBURN
for Don Cheney
When you know a hard sky the surface of a stone sea,
the texture of popcorn foil.
When its belly sonograms across the eyes and face,
the tissues of heaven static above fields and asphalt.
By RON WELBURN
for Francis Martin (Nauset/Nipmuc)
Blind at night in the forest,
you are right about fear and
what it does to you there,
how fluids and adrenaline fix the eyes
on what the mind cannot accept.
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