Poem for a Tuesday — “Friendship Days at Akwesasne”

by Maurice Kenny

For Francis

Humid afternoon by the St. Lawrence,

women canoe-races paddle the river;

full of fry-bread, soda and hot

strawberry-rhubarb pie

I stumble under the cedar arbor

to listen to the drum and singing.

Outfitted Mohawks circle a “stomp dance.”

I take a place on a bench near

an elder woman who asks in Mohawk,

what do I do? Tote bag slung over my

left shoulder I figure I should own up.

“I’m a writer”. . . in smiles.

“What kind?” she asked, really curious.

“A poet,” I replied proudly . . .

to which she offered a grunt,

got up from the bench and huffed off.

Well, maybe she was right.

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in Maurice Kenny. Humors and/or Not So Humorous, Buffalo: Swift Kick #7/8, 1988.

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Maurice Kenny drew on the lifeways and perspectives of his Mohawk tribal heritage. Kenny understood animal and natural life as part of an essential continuum of consciousness in which we are embedded. He lived for years in Brooklyn where he worked as an editor, publisher, and poet. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Kenny was increasingly active in Native American activism, having undergone an awakening to the extent and significance of his own Mohawk identity in the wake of the Occupation of Alcatraz in 1969. He eventually returned to his Mohawk homeland, settling in Saranac Lake. He taught at North Country Community College, Paul Smiths College, and SUNY Potsdam. Kenny once wrote, “Let it be known I love this America on Turtle’s back…the mountains and skies and all between. I have crossed its beauty hundreds of times and celebrate all happiness and greenness.” In 2002, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.

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