Cod by Cheryl Savageau
Cod
by by Cheryl Savageau
It is the fish that bring them first.
Cod in such numbers as to seem endless.
Cod to fill the nets and bellies of hungry
Europeans with the tender white flesh.
Cod, it seems to them, without end.
They fill the ships,
salting the fish
down in barrels,
til the hull is full,
and head back home. This wet
cod-fishing goes on for
years, far out in the Banks,
with only an occasional stop on land.
We dry our fish in the sun
cure it in smoke-houses
and sure enough, the
foreigners hear
about it.
Soon they need
a land base
to dry the cod
which weighs less
than when wet
tastes better, too
it is these dreams
of cod that
first bring
the French
to land
dreams
of cod
the gold
of the sea
that will
fill their bellies
and their
pockets
I love this poem for many reasons: it has food and history, two of my favorite things to read about. Plus, I love the way Savageau breaks her lines and has the poem's entire form get tighter, more contricted, less spacious, and narrower, mimicking what the poem is saying--what happened to the Abenaki. It is brilliant, particularly because the poem ends the thing that still troubles this country (and others); the "filling of pockets" that harms nature, animals, people, and cultures. The poem forces us with its form to feel that suffocation, however slight to us reading it now compared to what happened to Native people when Europeans arrived here.
And the poem starts so innocently--strangers who happen upon great schools of fish. In stanza two, we know things are going to go basly, even if we do not know American history. Our other clue is back in stanza one, and one of the absolutely greatest line breaks in all of poetry, creating this line:
Europeans with the tender white flesh
Bwahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!
As if trying to lull us into a sense of complacency, the poet pops in very converseational tone in the third stanza with "sure enough," referring to the French fishers seeing that the Native people have ways of preserving fish that will benefit the French. And that and other interactions between Native Americans and Europeans, of course, leads to the decimation caused by small pox, wars, reservations, and the crushing of Native societies to almost nothing.
You can read more about this wonderful Massachusetts poet at the Poetry Foundation website. Savageau does not have her own website. There is not a lot of her poetry online, but you can find her books (poetry, children's lit, and memoir) on Amazon.
You can learn more about the Abenaki at these websites:
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