We’re breaking all speed limits
to get to there,
though who knows exactly where
“there” is. Just somewhere else,
just somewhere that’s not “here.”
Maybe Sinai? Maybe Algeria?
On a map, there’s lots of room there.
Maybe somewhere sub Saharan?
The feeling is, we just want them out.
We just want our country back.
We want them gone.
That’s all Andrew Jackson wanted too,
and he did it. In spite of law,
in spite of treaties,
in spite of his own country’s
Supreme Court,
Maybe you are listening,
Bibi.
Remember Oslo?
Like you, he found a way
to unbalance power.
“John Marshall has made his decision,”
he said. “Now let him enforce it.”
And then he did the opposite
with soldiers, and with guns.
It was a popular choice
made easy by sentiments widely,
deeply shared, of fear, and,
I hate to say, for some, of greed.
They left by majority vote,
though they, of course,
they did not vote themselves.
They were not citizens
till 1924. And votes?
Well, that came later,
much, much later, though now
it seems, in some parts,
that too, again, is gone.
So that is our legacy, Bibi.
And that is our hero.
Jackson lives on our twenty.
And I’ve spent a bunch of those
in recent years, against my explicit
individual consent
to send you bombs. No wonder
Biden gives unqualified
support: we are the same.
We have that kind of history.
We’ve had those kinds of goals.
As for our natives, it was winter
when they left.
The soldiers marched them west,
through their receding history,
while those who’d voted
turned their backs and faced
manifestly
East for a change,
not observing their deaths
or counting them, choosing
to see, instead, unfettered land
that they named “wilderness.”
They told themselves a story
about this land that looked to them
so empty, and so new.
They claimed it as their own,
and while they spoke they
garbed themselves in
innocence
and flags.
These are my ancestors, Bibi,
I cannot hate them,
but I feel sad.
And everyday you make
me sad for all your people too.
I love them too, and
it bothers me, to see
you rewind, then replay,
sped up, these wrongs
for everyone to see, and
in real time.
Yes, sadly, as Biden said, we
are you, and you are we.
And here we are roped
together, back to back,
trying to go forward, but
only going round and round
in the same old circle.
And as for those natives
who once lived here
but we moved west?
We also took away,
so much, from them
that would have let them make
another place their own.
Have you seen Gaza?
Have you been there?
Yes, it was winter when they left,
and it’s still winter here
though the world is getting hotter
every day, all across these long months
of darkness and of dying.
Rashida, I saw you crying last night
for your people, and I want you
to know these images
are breaking me also
into tears. And they
are also breaking
other parts of us
that should be tender,
while we look away,
and go on, just the way
we always have, breaking
our necks, and breaking our hearts
to get there, wherever
“there” is, as this poem
circles back where it began
and we’re all just a little deeper
into hell, along this same
old Trail of Tears, and going
at least 120 miles per hour.
—
Martha Highers is a poet and creative nonfiction writer living in Tennessee. She edits the creative nonfiction journal Under the Sun.
