Old English, New World

Shenandoah River, North Fork, July 2023

Last summer we found that over the years, all kinds of old ironmongery had been caught in the current of the river, and dumped in the lee of a boulder that’s normally underwater. I wrote about it on my Old English blog because it seemed like the sort of thing Old English elegiac poets would like.

I showed the post to Sørina Higgins’s Author’s Circle, who told me that (no Old English poets being available) I should write the poem myself. There wasn’t much to make a poem out of, though, until I read a Mastodon post from Martin Rundqvist. He pointed out that the movie version of a Viking ship burial, where the ship is set on fire, is nonsensical — the ship would only burn down to the waterline. In reality, the ship was buried. The wood rots away, but the pattern of nails tells him and his colleagues what they’re looking at. OK — now there can be a poem.

This is in the standard Old English alliterative form, which I’ve tweaked for Modern English by allowing any number of unstressed syllables among the four stresses. Many thanks to the Author’s Circle for their advice.

The Shenandoah shows a shoal among rocks.
There eddies swirl, iron comes to rest,
concealed beneath stream-flows where
salamanders swim. But summer’s drought
lowered the river to levels unheard-of.

A drought like this can dig up old times.
Farms and pastures that formerly stood
on the banks of the river in bygone days
decayed, collapsed, and crumbled to ruin.
The forest fauna, fungus, and termites
ripped out the parts of the ruins they could use.
The rest washed to the riverbed. Rainfall carried
hardware to sunken heaps out of memory.

Likewise Vikings were laid to rest
in ships whose timbers have shivered to mould.
In ages afterward, archaeologists
sifted through soil, seeking their history.
Prows like dragons, once proud and high,
deteriorate to mere traces in soil,
but the nails are waiting in numbers undiminished.

The land I call mine is littered with items
from camps built by campaigning armies:
arrowheads left by Iroquois bands;
a scabbard left over from the Civil War.
When farmers cut furrows into the earth,
hunters of relics from history come
to pick among the plow-leavings
and rummage around the river’s terraces.
Normally they turn up just nails and screws,
hinges from doors, and hoops from barrels,
and toss them back. Trash isn’t interesting.

Many are keepers of memories of war,
but few keep the old farmers in mind.