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Reconciliation Elegy

For the Narragansett People and the People of Montague

May 19, 2004
by Patricia Pruitt

Today we gather at the river

Our place in the living NOW

Rolling minute into hour

Hour into centuries. Our home

is made of history.

Today around the fire

Narragansetts and Montagueans gather

On the bank of the shining river

Along its green and fragile edge.

Its surface sometimes calm and blue.

A second sky for us to view, or a

Momentary grove of trees

Rippling in a water breeze.

Some say they swirl in dawn’s early fog

Forms still fishing in the river.

Some say they see at sunset a red stain

On the water, on rocks banking the river.

In our mind’s eye, Pocumtucks, Captain Turner

And his men live on

Through three hundred, twenty eight years of days.

(Memory thwarts death in this small way)

And memory brings us to this day.

Captain Turner and his men

In full heat for self-protection

Slew Pocumtucks young and old

And in turn were slain.

Narragansetts speak their part

We speak ours. Both from this vantage

Know a flow of blood is not

The river to the future.

The earth sustains us one and all

And life is sweet, but short.

We are searching for the word

Lost in the swirling tumbling Falls.  

We are searching for the gestures

To heal and reconcile us all.

Part prayer, part longing for grief

To cease. Part recognition of our shared

Estate. The word repeated paves the way

Til word become road

And we go in peace.