Bilbo Mound, Savannah
"They thought it ludicrous that any mound or pottery
in Georgia would be many centuries older than those
in Ohio and Illinois. The Bilbo Mound was over 3,000
years older than the oldest mound in Ohio!"
--"The Bilbo Mound and Village Site (3,540 B.C.),"
Richard L. Thornton, Apalache Research
East of the city, south of the river, west
of the sacred ocean, your patch of swampland
remains — your cypress and tupelo bottomland,
an ancient, somehow remaining piece in the
concrete/commercial and neighborhood-wattle
fabric-map of the urban city.
What prayers, what dances, with the words of
what language did your medicine healers call out,
waving turtle shell rattles, to bless and preserve
you for millennia, your damp bog soil still not
overrun by the tight-wound modern city?
Before Woodland, before Swift Creek, before
sand and grit-tempered pottery, in the planted
vegetable time of maygrass, knotweed, sunflower,
before grand earth-mound temples at Etowah,
Ocmulgee, Kolomoki, your people walked to you,
quiet foot falls to night rituals under the moon.
People of ebbtide, floodtide, crow moon, loon
moon, ebbtide, floodtide, people of deer, rabbit,
alligator, and fish, oyster, clam, and mussels,
who feasted under your trees at night, under
the foraging bats, left spearheads and bones here.
Still you remain in this small forest, bordered
by this new country's oldest golf course, plotted
out and played on by bored Scots in the 1700s.
Old concrete pipes pumped the city's run-off
to you in the 1800s, and today, your hand-dug
canoe canal going north to the river is very changed.
Place of seasonal ritual, place of ancestor spirits,
the new city has blessedly left you alone, but lined
your canal with concrete to drain the whole city
into a river of passing steel container ships, decks
high with metal boxes. No one knows, really, what
'Bilbo Regional Storm Drainage Canal' is named for.
May we keep it that way forever, forever leave you
alone in your miraculous small woods with only
songbirds in trees, morning sunshine in the dewy
circles of spiders' webs in branches, cottonmouths,
fish in brackish cross channels, and your ancient ghosts.
Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia where his yard is lush with vegetation. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Soul-Lit, Poets Reading the News, As It Ought To Be, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Amethyst Review 