FATHER OF WATERS

Author's Note: "Mississippi" is Natchez for "Father of Waters."

"Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!"
—Sir Walter Scott

Upon a misty, wind-swept northern strand
Where Caesar had once fought with painted men,
A sturdy North Man in a Roman's garb
Had looked upon the ancient moors and said,
"Though I was born upon a distant shore,
Though men in this land speak a foreign tongue,
Though my fathers' bones are not buried here,
This land is mine."

Where Nerthus opened up her bosom wide,
Thor filled it with ten million years of rain;
Deep, churning, brown, dark, wide, and powerful
The river flows and nourishes our crops.
Once cannons rang along its red clay banks,
The brown was turned to red with young mens' blood
When brother strove with brother on its shores.
The battlefields were rinsed clean by Thor's rain;
The Water-Father's everlasting flood,
The river that drains half a continent
Will long outlast the feuds of mortal men.

Like that stout German on the Saxon Shore,
My fathers' bones lie in a distant land,
But here in Vinland I have found my gods.
The Water-Father laps upon these hills.
This land is mine.