Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Carter Revard’s "Wazhazhe Grandmother" is a deeply evocative poem that weaves personal memory, Osage history, and environmental transformation into a meditation on place and lineage. The poem moves fluidly between past and present, evoking a vanished world of familial and cultural continuity disrupted by time, war, and modern development. Through its layered imagery, the poem captures both the intimate details of a childhood landscape and the broader historical shifts that have altered it.

The title situates the poem within an Osage (Wazhazhe) heritage, immediately centering the grandmother as both a personal and cultural figure. She is at once a presence in the speaker’s memory and an embodiment of a past way of life. The opening lines establish the family's settlement, locating them "out west of the Agency" at the edge of the prairie. This geographical positioning is significant—“Agency” refers to the government-run institutions that mediated relations between Native American communities and federal authorities. The phrase suggests a liminal space, one where the family has some autonomy but remains tethered to broader colonial structures.

The landscape of the poem is rendered with vivid sensory details, emphasizing the richness of the natural world. The family’s home is described as being near Timber Hill, a place shaped by Bird Creek’s winding path and the presence of wildlife, including prairie chickens that dance in the spring. The setting is not just a backdrop; it is alive, imbued with meaning and movement, reflecting both the continuity of nature and its temporality. The waterfall near which the speaker’s grandmother once lived is particularly resonant. As a child, the speaker remembers it as "so high" when he was six, its cascading water captured in Osage as ni-xe ga-thpe, “where the dark water turning into / a spilling of light.” The waterfall is both a literal and metaphorical site of transformation, a natural veil between past and present, stillness and motion.

The grandmother herself is described in terms that align her with this landscape. The quietness of the place mirrors "the way Grandma was quiet," making her presence inseparable from the land she inhabited. This alignment reinforces a connection between familial memory and environmental continuity—she is both a figure of the past and a force that shaped the speaker’s sense of place.

Yet, the poem does not merely dwell in nostalgia. It introduces the disruptions that have fractured this continuity. The grandmother, widowed during the war, moves south to Pawhuska, leaving behind the homestead. This displacement signals a broader historical pattern—the movement of Native families away from their ancestral lands, whether due to economic necessity, government policy, or personal loss. The speaker, recalling a return visit to the homestead, struggles to remember the purpose of the trip—“was it a picnic, or some kind / of retreat or vacation time / out of the August heat of Pawhuska?” The uncertainty underscores the loss of direct connection to the place; it exists now more as memory than as a lived experience.

A crucial shift occurs in the latter part of the poem as the speaker turns to the fate of Bird Creek itself. Once a free-flowing waterway, it has been dammed to create Lake Bluestem, its original course submerged. The poem juxtaposes the past, where Bird Creek shaped the lives of the Osage people, with the present, where it has been “psyched out / of its snaggly, snaky self” into an artificial reservoir. The transformation is presented with both irony and sorrow—the lake is now a source of municipal water, promised by politicians to serve the needs of Pawhuska. The modernization comes at a cost: the homestead, the waterfall, and the dirt roads of memory are now buried beneath the lake, their history obscured by progress.

Despite this loss, the final image of the poem returns to a moment of origin—the wedding day of the speaker’s grandparents. The memory of them arriving at their new home, dressed in their best, counterbalances the earlier sense of displacement. The moment is both tender and tragic, highlighting the cyclical nature of settlement and erasure. The poem ultimately suggests that even as the physical landscape is altered, the stories embedded in it persist, carried forward by memory and language.

Revard’s poem blends personal reminiscence with historical awareness, using richly textured imagery to explore the shifting relationship between place, people, and time. The natural world, once a stable marker of identity and belonging, is now a site of erasure and artificial transformation. Yet, through poetry, the speaker reclaims this submerged past, preserving it as a living memory rather than a forgotten relic. "Wazhazhe Grandmother" is both an elegy and an act of reclamation, ensuring that what has been drowned is not entirely lost.

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