Cranberry bogs and kettle ponds
Tidal flats and beach escarpment cliffs
Sandbar spits and drifted dunes
Placing us in a terminal moraine landscape.
The people living here since the end of the last ice age
Evicted from their land by the English invaders
Killed off by foreign infections and aggressor wars
Remain like ghosts with their place names as reminders.
Those were my ancestors who were the perpetrators
Something no one much talked about growing up
While going to Natick to swim in Lake Cochituate
No one knew what those native words meant.
There was a time when salt works were built here
And the houses mostly followed the salt box design
A time when the railroad transported shellfish
And the transatlantic cable station buzzed Morse code.
Now we ride our bikes on the former rail line
Visiting this place that holds a lifetime of memories
So many summers past layered with the present
Mingle with the history in the ground found here.
So relaxed and comfortable at ease in this place
I could be happy just spending my days here
Wading the shallows and walking the beach
Watching the shorebirds getting on with their lives.
