A Poetry of Place: Nome, Alaska / Part 1 of 3.
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Within the first two and a half weeks of moving from Newburyport, Massachusetts to Nome, Alaska to work as a second grade teacher, I completed a Fish / Culture Camp and an Arts Education Camp for Alaska Teachers.
The Fish / Culture Camp was focused on understanding the significance of subsistence life to all that lived in Nome and in nearby White Mountain, a small riverside village. We were either fishing salmon, harvesting berries, avoiding moose or eating all of those back at camp. I passed on the moose as salmon is my go to.
This photo was taken out near White Mountain where we hiked in pursuit of blueberries and cloudberries. It’s of weather-bleached moose antlers piled in a mound; a map marker for hikers and fisherman.
Fish / Cultural Camp (the actual being at the camp) was the first week. The second week was the Art Camp for Alaska teachers. This was the first time it was held in Nome. A few dozen teachers from across the state gathered in classrooms in one of the district’s schools.The instructors were also Alaska educators. They guided us through one culturally relevant art activity and another.
One such project was making our own drums. The following are a few photos of me creating mine: painting the inside rim, stretching the hide for the top of the drum and then holding the finished drum:
My completed drum.
When each of us had finished our drums, we stood in a circle and rhythmically beat them. It was powerful to feel my self-made drum vibrate in my hands and hear my voice echo its sound within a group of others doing the same. It was a new way of engaging with my art; of creatively and emotionally expressing myself.
I banged the drum and this deep storm within me thundered. Then the drum was silent and so was the storm. It was in those first moments of using my drum that I began to think of the calm and the storm, the quiet and the screeching. Within my mind’s eye I saw two animals: a hare and an owl.
Two months later, Alaska Women Speak journal posted on social media a call for writing with the theme: Storm. This was my invitation to gather all of my first experiences in Nome including gold mining, the first Alaska indigenous Woman running for Congress, as well as an earthquake I experienced when I lived in Juneau, and weave them into a poem.
It’s finished title: The Hare and the Owl. I never mention my drum within the poem, but I am beating it. I submitted the poem and it was accepted for publication. The poem is below.
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The Hare and the Owl
Why does the heart
beat faster when
it’s near something
it fears or loves?
I saw a young man
at the Post Office
the other day
who had one ounce of gold,
that he had panned,
in a capped vial.
He sold it to the post-woman
who told him,
“You made my day.”
She placed her hand
over her heart and added,
“My heart is beating up a storm!”
I live in
Nome, Alaska
where a polar bear
clings to the entranceway
of a building that many
recently entered
to vote the first
Alaska Native into Congress.
They say she avoids
conflict with empathy, truly.
She is a Northern
Yu’pik wind that will
bring much change to the
four directions noted on a compass.
Yet, it won’t be a storm.
Is a storm invited?
She was.
Years ago,
in Juneau,
an earthquake
shook my wind-chimes and my bed.
It was the aurora borealis,
that ripple of light,
but of earth and furnishings,
as well as myself.
Then, utter stillness.
Without bad weather,
what is a storm?
It’s that human action
that shakes and dislodges
others and things
from their grounding;
velvet from its antler.
I am a she-woman
that claims for herself
both the calm and the storm,
the hare and the owl,
the quiet and the screeching.
Susan Slocum Dyer / © SSD
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