Mvskoke: Whispers of the Creek Path

Lyrics

[Intro]
Before the grid.
Before the terminus.
Before the fire of 1917.
There was the path.
Just the path.

[Verse 1]
The air here was damp earth and pine resin.
The sound was the Chattahoochee, speaking in its own time.
Moccasins pressed the red clay,
tracing a line from Pakanv Hutke, from Standing Peachtree.
This was a hunting ground.
Not a ward. Not a number.
A place to preserve the grounds...
...for a subsistence.

[Chorus]
And the Mvskoke whisper is on the Creek path.
Under the asphalt of Ponce de Leon, it waits.
Under the noise of the new rhythm, it holds its breath.
This land has a memory older than its name.

[Verse 2]
They rolled the chunkey stones in the clearing.
They met in the Chokofa, the council house,
where words had the weight of seasons.
They carved the dugout canoes from the heart of the longleaf pine.
Life was a current,
moving with the river,
not against it.

[Chorus]
And the Mvskoke whisper is on the Creek path.
Under the asphalt of Ponce de Leon, it waits.
Under the noise of the new rhythm, it holds its breath.
This land has a memory older than its name.

[Bridge]
Then came the parchment maps, laid over the deerskin.
Then came the sharp pen of William McIntosh.
February twelfth. Eighteen twenty-five.
The Treaty of Indian Springs.
A signature that broke a nation.
A rifle shot echoes from April, 1820-six.
And the path became a trail of tears.
A forced march in the biting cold.
The whispers turned to weeping.

[Outro]
Now the cars hum down the old ridgeline.
The porch lights glow on houses built over the silence.
But the path is still here.
It remembers the weight of the feet that made it.
It remembers.