THE MOUNTAINS REMEMBER

 

Before the rifles came to clear the land,

The Blue Ridge rose through veils of morning mist;

Our feet knew every valley, stream, and strand,

Each trail remembered every hand it kissed.

The rivers held our stories in their flow,

The winds carried the names our elders gave;

Our words were leaves that whispered soft and low,

Our language was the fire our ancestors saved.

Sequoyah gave our living words a form,

And letters bloomed like branches in the rain;

We wrote our voices through the silence of the storm,

So none could say our people lived in vain.

Then soldiers came like shadows before dawn,

With orders written colder than the stone;

They drove us from the homes we had lived upon,

And claimed the earth as though it were their own.

The hearths still burned; the beds were left behind,

The doors stood open to the empty air;

A mother searched for children she could not find,

While grief became the only thing to bear.

Rising Fawn spoke words that would not bend,

And justice once declared our claim was true;

Yet power turned its face and chose to send

Our homeland into hands that were not due.

Can theft become just because force commands?

Can violence turn possession into right?

Can laws written by another's hands

Make sacred wrong appear as lawful light?

A treaty signed by men who did not speak

For every heart and bloodline of our own-

New Echota left our people weak,

And made our homeland something to be sold.

Then came the chains, the stockades, the cold night,

The sickness spreading through the crowded air;

We watched our elders fade from fading light,

While mothers held their children in despair.

The road stretched on beneath a frozen sky,

Each mile another grave, another name;

The snow fell softly as the dead passed by,

And winter seemed to mourn them all the same.

A path  of tears was carved across the earth,

Where footsteps disappeared beneath the snow;

Our daughters carried grief beyond their birth,

And children learned too young what loss could know.

Across that road, countless lives were lost,

And countless hearts were buried far from home;

The empire rose, but counted not the cost-

Its foundations rest where our dead bones lie.

You may possess the soil by force of hand,

You may build cities where our villages stood;

But no empire can command the memory of land,

Nor make injustice suddenly become good.

Force may seize the earth beneath our feet,

But it cannot silence what the mountains know;

No stolen ground can make the conquest sweet,

Nor wash the blood that history will show.

Yet through the darkness, something still survived:

Our songs, our language, stories, names, and flame;

Though bodies fell, the spirit stayed alive,

And memory carried forward all the same.

We carried embers hidden in our chest,

Old songs that even sorrow could not drown;

The road could take our homes, but not the rest-

For what was ours in spirit could not be bound.

And generation after generation speaks,

Not only of the sorrow, but the truth;

The past still lives in every word one seeks,

In every elder, every child, and youth.

The mountains have not forgotten where we stood;

The rivers still remember what they knew.

The earth may bear the marks of what was done,

But memory keeps alive what once was true.

So hear us-not as echoes from the past,

But as a people whose memory remains:

No violence can make an injustice last,

Nor bury truth beneath forgotten names.

Across the miles, across the years, across the land,

Our ancestors still walk where shadows fall;

You may have taken what was ours by hand,

But you could never take our soul at all.

And if the mountains speak, they will recall

The homes, the songs, the children, and the dead-

For kingdoms rise, and kingdoms one day fall,

But truth walks on where history has bled.

Our footsteps live within the mountain floor;

Our voices travel with the river's roar.

The land remembers what it knew before-

And what was taken cannot be erased anymore.