No Indians
only my grandfather
reciting the poem that honored
his colonial forebears
From Somerset and Devon
he would intone
from Kent and Lincolnshire
only much later
would I come to understand
his misplaced pride
and why it was the younger sons
who "came forward"
having been disinherited
both by custom and by law
so as to preserve the great estates
which goes a long way
towards explaining
the British Empire

But it was moving
to me as a boy
hearing his resonant voice
reach out over the wooded hillside
though regardless the name
of the hill we stood on
the poem never mentioned
the smallpox epidemic
that had opened so to speak
the coastal land for settlement
even before the Mayflower
sailed into Cape Cod bay
the plague
a clear sign of God's purpose

Today the Wampanoags
whose ancestors arrived
toward the end of the last ice age
have restored the native name
Aquinnah rather than Gay Head
and I suspect Tashtego
Melville's Gay Head harpooner
would be happy with the change

The Maori are said
to have turned down the official
offer of two billion dollars
saying no thanks we're waiting
to have our island back

Sadly with Martha's Vineyard
the only one to take the island back
will be the sea itself
rising as the polar ice
keeps melting and the ocean
keeps expanding with the heat

Before that happens though
there's time enough to taste the sweetness
of the native grapes
to wade in tidal ponds left
by the ice in its retreat
time to watch the sunset
from Menemsha as the spring tide
rushes in to fill the great pond
and the sun sinks
into Vineyard Sound
while in the east
the full moon rises
huge on the horizon

There's time as well to honor
if belatedly
the first migrants to settle here
millennia before
the European colonists arrived
who left ceremonial spear points
pale yellow and blue flints
beautifully knapped
long buried under Vineyard sand
and whose Wampanoag descendants
still dig for quahogs
gather wild cranberries
for the mid-October festival
still tell their children the old tales
and work the red and yellow clays
of the Aquinnah cliffs