Blues for Piper's Creek from poet Rasheena Fountain

A Chum Salmon’s Refrain

(Bop after Afaa Michael Weaver)

(A Chum salmon encounters a Blues Woman playing blues at Dropped Down creek located in Carkeek Park on the traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People)

Look at me—the way my body wades the ripples
to die, a sour-spectacled human delight
Onlookers stare, mystified by resilience—the new fix
My requiem, a feat, feeding forest frenzy:
hunting herons, rowdy raccoons, impossible imaginations—
the filth I withstand, in the creek of death’s Western dreams

Ain’t I a salmon?

I’m pleading in the currents
My voice, the echoing splashes in silent springs
Into the deadening stillness, I fight no more
as futures release into peculiarity.
The spectacle, the chorus for our swansong;
their gleeful eyes trapping destiny’s Pandora’s Box
of murky illusion & allusive fault
Life cycles through sorrow’s mourning spouts

Ain’t I a salmon?

A woman hears my resilient pain—
a blues bird calling notes afloat worried water
In chorus: Ain’t I a woman?:
her tune touches me ever so grave.
I take flight in frequencies, hovering in soundwaves
I join her in song, singing along, with troubling lung:

Ain’t I a salmon?