Classic Poem

I WHO love this land, who love this wide valley,
The straight high temples of the hills, the river's curve,
The smooth unbroken water, the fertile meadows,
What is my love, what is this memory I serve?

I, a stranger from another land, a newcomer
Of two brief centuries ago, alien and pale,
Talking a strange tongue, looking over this vastness
With short-seeing eyes, dimly, behind a veil;

What should I, who was bred in square houses
With fear and a flintlock always ready at hand,
Who looked from a barricade for smoke or arrows,
What should I know of the meaning of this land

That you know, who walked with velvet feet in these forests,
Who dipped a long silent paddle into this stream,
Remembered no other place, worshiped upon these hilltops,
And then saw land and people pass as in a dark dream?

What is my love to yours, O ghostly Chieftain,
How can I look at this land from within your eyes?
Where I see rolling hills and a meadow pasture,
You saw forever the smoke of the wigwams rise.

You saw there the place of birth and death. Your eternal
Hunting Ground was as near as the distant view.
How should I, alien, understand the love you bore it?
Yet for a moment, here on this hilltop, I knew.