Inuit Goggles 1957

Inuit Goggles 1957 Ron Welburn (bio) I heard in the Dead Lecturer’s “slits in the metal, for sun”* the resonance of Inuit goggles, my trope of resistance to the transatlantic endgame, impression from my ignorance of the cage with a heart beating, wishing it was somewhere else, when his someone else moved inside me. Snow storm and winter offer us the languages of survivance. The goggles frame reference to my wandering about with the rest of the people who know that even time follows cycles like our nations. North Pacific circumpolar. I had cut out a set of goggles from Nana’s tailor shop cardboard, long before the lecturer substitute’s visit. Putting them on, I sought my relatives on the other side. Ron Welburn Ron Welburn is an enrolled member of the Southeastern Cherokee Confederacy, a mentor for Wordcraft Circle, and chair of the Five Colleges, Inc., American Indian Studies Committee. He teaches American literatures at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His most recent collection of poems is Council Decisions (1990). Footnotes * The quote is from the poem, “As Agony, As Now,” by Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), originally published in The Dead Lecturer (Grove Press, 1963). Copyright © 1996 Charles H. Rowell

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