Woodsie
1
What is a woodsie
Campers wonder now
A sign spraypainted on the
Wrecked machine shed
Not in your lap in class
Or the biggest beaver
I can tell you what woodsies
Were back in the eighties
Carl would go down
To the package store
Barrel up with his
Fake ID and mustache
Roll the keg into his car
Leave it in the woods for later
2
It was always Al who
Turned the screw
And the screwtop
The spiral opener
On the downmarket ripple
We had so many words
For booze the hooch
The suds the hard stuff
But so few for the future
Or the teepee we would build
Beyond the trespassing marker
Rusting on an old maple
3
Whose woods they were
We did not know but
There were arrowheads
Artifacts and walls
Growing up we were told
We were little Indians
Given gifts of feathers
Toy tomahawks to hold
As if Chiefs were children
Though they were not
We stole the wilderness
Like pilgrims stole the rock
4
When Al spun the bottle
He turned the knife
He made you kiss the girl
He wanted for himself
Al scared me and he
Scared himself to death
He jumped off a bridge
And hit a hidden piling
He was drunk and high
The bridge was too far up
5
On the last woodsie of the year
We would bury a Solo cup
A sepulcher to summer
Consecrating our litter
We lit the flip-top boxes
Of our cigarettes to
Watch the angel ashes
Climb the evening air
6
I lost my father’s watch
In the bed of a truck
Somewhere between Camp
And where the woodsie was
Still when the time came
It was me who returned
The keg for our deposit
Sheepish, pimply, proud
Tick tock drip drop
Beer running an amber river
The woods we believed we
Only borrowed were not wild
When we drank we watered
The ground with our piss
Our woodsie owned us
Forest neither feral nor free
–Ticky Kennedy
Reclusive Poet in Residence
SchoolNewsToday.com
NOTE
During the Cold War, President John F Kennedy recruited Robert Frost as part of his nationalist propaganda project when he made Frost the first US Poet Laureate. Many of Frost’s beloved poems encode an imperialist “Manifest Destiny” racist narrative, especially the poem Frost read at JFK’s inauguration “The Gift Outright,” which insults the indigenous peoples the US was taken from. For a reply to that famous poem by Native American poet Heid E. Erdrich, read “The Theft Outright.”
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