Maasweeseexay (Monument Mountain)

By Bonney Hartley

Thou

face

forget

 

thy heart

            

 

thy vision. Thou

gaze

on white villages

swarm­ing

        hear


the old world

nations

drown

And many

go down


With the cen­turies

white­ness

a fearful thing


tumbled down

in frag­ments

      hear the sound

strug­gle

murmurs


amid


Par­adise


BONNEY HARTLEY is a ’25 MFA-Cre­ative Writing can­di­date at Insti­tute of Amer­i­can Indian Arts and holds an MSocSci in Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions from Uni­ver­si­ty of Cape Town, South Africa. She is an enrolled member of the Stock­bridge-Munsee Com­mu­ni­ty and found­ing member of Mohican Writers Circle. She has been a com­mis­sioned poet of Bard College and has forth­com­ing work in the Bound­less exhibit cat­a­logue (Smith College Mead Museum), The Last Milk­weed (Tupelo Press), and North Berk­shire Land­scapes: A Cel­e­bra­tion (Tupelo Press & Williamstown Rural Lands). Bonney lives within Mohican home­lands in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

 

This poem orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 21. 

Photo by Dan Rogers

© 2024 Stonecoast Review. Indi­vid­ual copy­rights held by contributors.

The Stonecoast Review is the lit­er­ary journal of the Stonecoast MFA at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Maine.