American History
We laid our leather boats in a stream,
steered north for bream and bank martin,
fattish brooks and honeyed roots.
We followed the scent of pitcher plants
cast across the river, past
plumes of bees in orange blooms,
emerald streamers, hanging moss
where storks at rest, secure in their nests,
tossed upon us tassels of gold,
what appeared to be various
species of Gordonia, what the inhabitants call
the White Lily of the Swamp.
After we came to the land
of the inhabitants themselves,
holding their jugs in the water-drum of clouds,
waist-high, patient, in fields of floating plants
where trout passed freely,
rainbowed by the force of fresh water,
we removed their phlox-like entrails,
placed their carcasses in forked
roads of trees, so they appeared as mere
stems, killed by winter frost.
A gift, we thought, from our benevolent god,
the sheen of wet grass in early morning light, like
the minds of those inhabitants, which we had wanted
for our own. As long as this was our dream,
no one would know what was lost.
Copyright © 2025 by Jennifer Elise Foerster. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 27, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Accounts of early explorers in America, especially those of ‘naturalists,’ are often richly lyrical with details of ‘newly found’ species of plants and animals. The people in these accounts, however, are rarely recounted as people. And what the lyricism often masks is the greed to claim the wonders, the land, the resources, the knowledge, for one’s own, at the expense of the people already long inhabiting that place. In this poem, I’ve tried to inhabit the minds not of the land’s actual inhabitants but of those who traveled to colonize: What story does one tell themselves to justify the violence of colonization? The same can be asked of today’s neoliberal capitalists. This deluded version of American history, told as a story of wonder and discovery, is, I think, how we got to where we are today.”
—Jennifer Elise Foerster
Jennifer Elise Foerster
Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of The Maybe-Bird (The Song Cave, 2022), among other titles. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Foerster has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She teaches in the Institute of American Indian Arts’ low-residency MFA program in creative writing and at the Rainier Writing Workshop. Foerster lives in San Francisco on Ramaytush Ohlone land.