The son remembered what the father forgave.
Metacom—the English called him Philip,
As if a king required their name to have
His sovereignty—the tulip
Of the Wampanoag sachem's line,
Son of Massasoit, who watched
The forty years of his father's design
Unravel—every promise botched,
Every boundary crossed, every court
Of the sachem overruled by the magistrate,
Every hunting ground cut short
By the fence, the cow, the freight
Of the ever-arriving English and their claim
That God had emptied this land for them—
That the plague itself was the righteous flame
Of Providence clearing Jerusalem
For the chosen, and the Indian was the Canaanite
Whose dispossession was divine command.
Metacom watched. By sixteen-seventy-five,
The Wampanoag were penned upon a strand
Of their former territory, alive
But diminished, and the murder of his counselor
Wamsutta—his brother, dead
In English custody, the chancellor
Of a justice that dispensed its lead
To the convenient suspect—burned
Like a coal in Metacom's chest.
And the hanging of three Wampanoag men
At Plymouth, tried by English law, the test
Of a sovereignty that was dying—when
The sachem's own people could be judged
And killed by a foreign court,
The treaty was not merely smudged
But annihilated, every sort
Of pretense stripped away.
And Metacom chose war.
Not the impulsive raid of the desperate—
But the careful, the corridor
Of alliance built with the deliberate
Skill of the statesman: Nipmuck,
Pocumtuck, Narragansett,
Abenaki—the pluck
Of a dozen nations forming the net
That might strangle the colonies
Before they grew too strong to kill.
In the summer of sixteen-seventy-five,
New England burned.
The grill
Of the frontier blazed: Swansea first, then alive
With flame came Brookfield, Deerfield, the mill
At Springfield, Northfield, Hatfield—
Twelve of the region's ninety towns
Destroyed completely, the battlefield
Scattered across the forest's browns
And greens from the Connecticut to the coast.
The English had never known such war—
Per capita, no conflict's host
In American history killed more:
One in ten colonists dead or displaced,
And the Indigenous losses deeper still—
For the English could be replaced
By the next ship's hold, but the fill
Of Metacom's alliance was the last
Of each nation's fighting strength.
The Great Swamp Fight—December, bitter cold,
The English and their Mohegan allies at length
Found the Narragansett stronghold
Deep in the Rhode Island cedar swamp:
A fortified island in the frozen marsh
Where the Narragansett families made their camp—
Women, children, elders—and the harsh
And merciless assault set fire
To the wigwams while the people slept inside,
And the screaming and the pyre
Of the burning village was the tide
That turned the war—for the Narragansett loss
Was not just warriors but the very
Heart of the nation, the cross
They bore for joining Metacom's wary
Coalition.
And still they fought.
Through the winter of seventy-six, the raids
Continued—the colonists were caught
Between the forest and the blades
Of an enemy who knew every trail,
Every ford, every ambush-hollow—
And the Massachusetts English turned pale
At the prospect that Boston might follow
Springfield into the ash.
But the spring
Brought hunger to the forest camps,
And the alliance began unraveling—
The Mohawk attacks, the damps
Of disease, the shortage of the powder
That the English blockade denied,
And one by one the coalition's chowder
Of desperate nations lost its pride
And scattered—some surrendered, some fled north
To the Abenaki and the French,
And Metacom was driven forth
From refuge to refuge, the wrench
Of the hunted king who watched his war
Collapse around him.
August, sixteen-seventy-six.
The swamp at Mount Hope—the shore
Where Metacom was born—the fix
Of the final betrayal: an Indian ally
Of the English, Alderman of the Pocassets,
Shot Metacom beneath the sky
Of his ancestors, and the colonists' debts
Were paid in the worst coin: they quartered
The body of the sachem, hacked
The head from the shoulders, and slaughtered
The dignity of the dead—the compact
Of hatred's ritual: Metacom's head
Was mounted on a pike at Plymouth
For twenty years—the dread
And grinning trophy of the monolith
Of colonial power ascending.
His wife and son were sold as slaves
To the Caribbean—the ending
Of the Wampanoag line, the waves
That carried Massasoit's grandchild south
To the sugar-fields of Bermuda's hell,
Where the treaty's final mouth
Spoke its last and cruelest spell.
Honor Metacom—the son who saw
What the father chose not to see,
Who read the treaty's hidden flaw
And rose against the certainty
Of his own destruction—who burned
New England to the ground and nearly won,
Who proved that the dispossessed had earned
The right to fight beneath the sun
Of their own country—and whose severed head
Upon the Plymouth pike was the price
Of the resistance of the living and the dead
Against the colony's device:
The taking of the land by law and sword,
The replacement of the people by the plow—
And Metacom broke the colonist's cord
Of safety and the comfortable vow
That the Indian was the vanishing shadow—
He showed them that the shadow had teeth,
That the forest and the meadow
Would not surrender what lay beneath
Without the fight that shakes the world.