Cooduvalli Poem 4
Brian Childers is a 20th century poet who is well known for his children’s poems which focus mainly on the Native American culture. Childers was intrigued with the Trail of Tears, a mass movement of people in which the Cherokee Indians were forced to move west of the Mississippi River to Oklahoma under Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Policy in 1858. This migration led to a lot of suffering and loss since many of the old, young, and weak died due to fatigue and others faced new and deadly diseases. In Childers’s poem, The Trail of Tears, Childers presents the audience with a realistic, but fictional, account of the hardships the Native Americans faced during the migration. The poem is structured in a way that the majority expands upon the problem and struggle while the latter third of the poem comes to a resolution, which unfortunately ends with the speaker wanting to face death rather than continuing on with the brutal journey.
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The Trail of Tears
I look to the long road behind
My heart is heavy with my people's sorrow
Tears of grief I weep - for all that we have lost
As we march ever farther from the land of our birth
On the Trail of Tears
Mile after mile and day after day
Our people are fewer with each rising sun
The Trail of Tears
I look to the long road behind
My heart is heavy with my people's sorrow
Tears of grief I weep - for all that we have lost
As we march ever farther from the land of our birth
On the Trail of Tears
Mile after mile and day after day
Our people are fewer with each rising sun
Disease and starvation they take their terrible toll
And though we suffer still we march on
On the Trail of Tears
I watch my beloved weaken and fall
Upon the road like so many before
With tears in my eyes I hold my wife to my breast
And in my arms she breathes her last
On the Trail of Tears
And though we suffer still we march on
On the Trail of Tears
I watch my beloved weaken and fall
Upon the road like so many before
With tears in my eyes I hold my wife to my breast
And in my arms she breathes her last
On the Trail of Tears
Mile after mile and day after day
We march to a land promised us for all time
But I know that I can no longer go on
I know that is a land that I shall never see
On the Trail of Tears
As my body - it falls to embrace the earth
We march to a land promised us for all time
But I know that I can no longer go on
I know that is a land that I shall never see
On the Trail of Tears
As my body - it falls to embrace the earth
My spirit - it soars to greet the sky
With my dying breath am I finally set free
To begin the very long journey towards home
On the Trail of Tears
With my dying breath am I finally set free
To begin the very long journey towards home
On the Trail of Tears
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