Thursday, January 30, 2025: Kelley Jean White's "Aquedoctan"

 

Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner-city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her recent books are Toxic Environment (Boston Poet Press) and Two Birds in Flame (Beech River Books). She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

Aquedoctan

At a place called Aquedoctan

Paugus Bay meets Winnipesaukee,

Here dwelt Abenaki people

Long before the current era

Here they fished in spring and summer

Traded food and strings of wampum

Feasted, prayed, danced and courted

Made alliances with each other

Tribes that came to gather winter

Supplies and share the new news

Of other people’s dealings further

To the North, South, East, and Western

And the doings of the English

Who soon enough a man called Endicott

Came from the stolen land of Massachusetts

And he claimed a rock that guarded

The stoneworks long relied on

To support the basketwork weirs networks

That give the place its current name

Weirs Beach

Paugus was of the Pequawket

Dwelling by the Saco River

Slain in 1725 in the war of Father Rale

Today this ‘Oak’ is not forgotten

Though the mother lake’s name

A mystery, perhaps the Winnepiseogee

People called it by some other poetry

Like the names of Winnipesaukee

‘Shining water among green mountains,’

Or perhaps ‘Smile of the Great Spirit,’

Like the Penacook beside the Merrimack

Likely people spoke here in Algonquin

Tongues and signs in peace here

As the lake-locked shad and salmon

Swam to spawning. It would have been

A time of peace and plenty

Pause within yearly privation.

Within decades the Europeans

Forced the shad out of these waters

As they damned once mighty rivers

For manufacturing power and production

Bought rights to control New Hampshire waters

Lakes Squam, Winnisquam and Winnipesaukee

And the Winnipesaukee River where it meets

The Pemigewassett, becomes the Merrimack.

Now all traces of the ahquedakenash,

Great stones that channeled the great fish spawning

Have been dredged from the channel

To make room for pleasure craft and speedboats

And perhaps the full moon here now is smaller

Certainly the stars are dimmer

Competing with the ‘vintage’ neon signs

And ‘Victorian’ lampposts lit

To make the Weirs seem more appealing

To today’s summer crowds come to take the waters

Beside a ticky-tacky boardwalk

Playing Skee-ball and arcade games

Roaring motorcycles in defiance

But if you listen even today you’ll hear

A gathering of many people, tongues and voices

Come to trade news of many places, many lands

Across far waters, people feasting,

Playing music, children laughing, couples courting

Perhaps one day another archeologist

Will dig up today’s bones and beercans

As a record of place and people

In yet another great migration, now from Mexico

And Cuba, Haiti, Pakistan and Montreal.

 © 2025 Kelley J. White