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November is Native American Heritage Month.
MOONSET - by Emily Pauline Jonnson
Idles the night wind through the dreaming firs,
That waking murmur low,
As some lost melody returning stirs
The love of long ago;
And through the far, cool distance, zephyr fanned.
The moon is sinking into shadow-land.
The troubled night-bird, calling plaintively,
Wanders on restless wing;
The cedars, chanting vespers to the sea,
Await its answering,
That comes in wash of waves along the strand,
The while the moon slips into shadow-land.
O! soft responsive voices of the night
I join your minstrelsy.
And call across the fading silver light
As something calls to me;
I may not all your meaning understand,
But I have touched your soul in shadow-land.
Emily Pauline Johnson, who also published under her paternal grandfather’s Mohawk name Tekahionwake (“double wampum”), was born on March 10, 1861, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and his English wife, on the Six Nations Reserve, Canada West, near the current Brantford, Ontario. Johnson published 165 poems during her lifetime. This one is from Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (The Musson Book Co., Limited, 1917) by Emily Pauline Johnson. She died in Vancouver, BC in 1913 with her ashes being buried in Stanley Park. This poem is in the public domain.S
Sally RiggersTh
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