Ralph Salisbury's three books of short fiction and eleven books of poems evoke his Cherokee-Shawnee-Irish-English-American heritage. His poem "In the Children's Museum in Nashville" was published in the New Yorker, in 1960, and has attracted some attention as a precursor to the contemporary Native American literary movement. In selecting his book Rainbows of Stone (2000) as an Oregon Book Award finalist, Maxine Kumin wrote: "Nature in Ralph Salisbury's conception is a Presence to be addressed . . . His book deserves a broad audience." Salisbury's newest book is Like the Sun in Storm by The Habit of Rainy Nights Press, 2012. He published three books in 2009: Blind Pumper at the Well, Salt Press, Cambridge, UK; The Indian Who Bombed Berlin, fiction, Michigan State University Press and Light from a Bullet Hole, poems new and selected 1950 - 2008, Silverfish Review Press, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
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SOME INCIDENTS, WORLD WAR TWO
Awakened by my mom,
sixteen, I’d clutch Dad’s gun,
because he’d be on his way to where my granny’d got sick,
and the army’d got my brother,
and maybe it would be our hens
squawking in the clutch of black-marketeers
or I’d smell our tractor’s gasoline, pouring into cans,
to be sold to the big city owners of big cars.
I’d shoot, and footfalls would flee,
leaving whatever was too heavy to carry rapidly away.
War and deaths of some friends
and everything too heavy two years ahead,
for a few moments of a few terrifying nights I tried to be
all that I needed to be to stay alive.
Published in Like the Sun in Storm by Habits of Rainy Nights Press, 2012.
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MY BROTHER'S POEM: VIETNAMESE WAR, 1969
You tell me you can not write it
yesterday's pretty village splinters and in
your aircraft cargo compartment ammunition/rations/med-
icines gone an American lies wrapped in his raincoat
strapped to the floor of that machine generations struggled
to invent and thousands of hours of lives went to create
the boy's belongings all he could bear
on his back packaged beside him
sunset a shimmer like cathedral glass
a memory the instrument-panel glow
as low as devotional candles showing
in plexiglass monsoon screams past your face
above the controls your own American face
Published in Going to the Water, Pacific House Books 1983
and in Light from a Bullet Hole, Poems New and Selected 1950 - 2008,
Silverfish Review Press (2009)
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LIGHT FROM A BULLET HOLE
She tells you I am her baby, twisting on shattered glass,
wind ghost-moaning in, turning my screams to steam,
turning the wall's bullet hole's light into an icicle,
witched into yellow pencil, with which I write
what she can not tell,
that I am her baby no longer,
our family's enemy's shot, which was meant
for somebody older, now striking someone so old
the world itself is his child, twisting in broken breath
It is a human death the telephone wires tell my ear,
half deafened by bomber motors, but still able to hear
the pleading of those who were burning, and milk
from my mother's nipple is light
from a bullet hole,
as I twist, again and again,
in diapers frozen to shattered ice
and offer, while blizzard-robed seraphim sing: "Mother, take,
from a thorn of light, the flesh
that was torn from you and wear it, warm in the night."
Published in Light from a Bullet Hole, Poems New and Selected 1950 - 2008,
Silverfish Review Press (2009)
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IN THE CHILDREN'S MUSEUM IN NASHVILLE
In the Children's Museum in Nashville, rattlesnakes coil,
protected by glass and by placards warning that if teased
they might just dash their brains against apparent air.
Negroes are advised that, if notified in advance,
the Children's Museum in Nashville will take care of them
on certain days. On an uncertain day, to regulate
my sons by Mother Nature's whims, I make it quite clear
that some skulls are less substantial than apparent air,
as, evidently, one empty cage verifies.
More durable are the heads of bison, eland
(from Africa), and other exhibits: a purple parrot,
who eventually condescends to demonstrate
by winking that, far from dead, he of his own free will
dreams over caged snakes in his own cage; blades
from China's dynasties and Malayan tribes;
some shrunken Jivaro noggins and a diminished Nashville;
and, most awesome, a bird and a squirrel
reborn at intervals from blacked-out flesh as white
skeletons. On Sundays, children are allowed a look
at electric stars. Seen every day is an Indian
child–cured by chance, the signs say
in a dry, airless place–still possessed
of parchment skin, thought eyeless, and still dressed
in ceremonial regalia
that celebrates his remove to a better world.
published in New Yorker, Modern Poetry of Western America, Brigham Young University Press, and Going to the Water, Poems of a Cherokee Heritage, Pacific House Books 83 and Light from a Bullet Hole, Poems New and Selected 1950 - 2008,
Silverfish Review Press (2009)
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Writer's Tip: Write out of impassioned love or impassioned hate, and, if some understanding comes through, so much the better.
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