Karla Linn Merrifield
1898: Captain W.’s Missing Person
In the annals of Everglades history, Hugh Willoughby’s early Seminole lexicon is admirably thorough —but it has no word for mother. Had the sad Miccosukee brave who, as his guide, reached across from dugout to canoe to shake the white explorer’s hand lost his mother to gator or water moccasin? Did it never occur to Willie Bee, as they called him, to ask the chieftain’s wife the word for what she was seven times over? How do you say matriarch in Seminole? He neglected to inquire. Or was it a small sin of omission by a guilty son? Someone he wished to forget and would not say her name aloud in his mother tongue much less in a native Floridian’s? I wonder what other words he never learned, never recorded. Why did he give no thought to that woman, Mother?
A Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Everglades National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had poetry appear in dozens of print and online publications as well as in many anthologies. She has four books to her credit, Midst, Godwit: Poems of Canada, Dawn of Migration and Other Audubon Dreams, and The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America; a fifth appeared this fall, The Etowah River Psalms. She is poetry editor of Sea Stories, book reviewer and assistant editor for The Centrifugal Eye and moderator of the poetry blog, Smothered Air. She teaches at Writers & Books in Rochester, NY and reads her poems to audiences regularly, most recently in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
