The “call & response” also represents the activist and environmentalist poet’s call to action for the preservation of the land and the recognition of its historical significance and environmental necessity. The musicality of the poem takes command as the repetition of “Call & response” in the second stanza emulates the song of the Cranes, the repetition of the call of the birds as they begin their migration home. The scattered, hurried, jumbled language emulates these “spiraled kettles” at the beginning of the poem, creating an interesting parallel between subject and language. The “spiraled kettles” represent the bird’s flight formations, the view of what they look like up in the sky, before the “kettling vortex siege” of their descent to the ground. The poem “rings with onomatopoeia”, causing you to “feel the rhythmic propulsion of each image as surely as you can feel your own pulse” (Van Buren). Similarly, in “ Platte Mares”, Hedge Coke explores the musicality and natural beauty of the landscape through the lens of the homeward migration of Nebraska’s famous Sandhill cranes. The insistence that “sing again I will, as I have always done” alludes to the perseverance of the song and the people, of their ability to never be silenced. The speaker is able to find solace in the music that gave creation, looking to the past in order to forgive the present. When she grows far past her self-considered purpose, I will sing her back, sing her back. Even though America “pushed herself away, forced me to remove myself,” the speaker still maintains a gentle tone and forgiving attitude, preparing to “pour forth singing.” The speaker’s willingness to forgive is most apparent in the final lines of the poem, as the song concludes and the mother “is willing to forgive the trespass and welcome the prodigal child back home” (Brown 260): The song as “mother” acts as the catalyst for creation, as the speaker explores the nature of the relationship between the two. Held her severed cord beautifully beaded. My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery, Oh, before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep, The second stanza explores this “parent-child” relationship, as the song gives life to new creation: The speaker of the poem “expresses love for a people and a nation that turned their backs on their Indigenous forebears as a child rebels against its parents” (Brown 259). “America, I Sing You Back” acts as a song of forgiveness, exploring the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the America that tried to push them out of their home. Hedge Coke’s “song” explores a similar sense of national identity, attempting to connect the past and present, to “Sing you home into yourself and back to reason.” Hedge Coke, like both Whitman and Hughes, “grounds her poetry in the lives of ordinary people, replete with their historical and cultural contexts” (Van Buren). Both poems explore differing ideas of what it means to be American in a changing national landscape, and the relationship between this complex sense of self-identity and patriotism. Oh, I will-I do.” The poem opens with a dedication to “Phil Young, My father Robert Hedge Coke, Whitman, and Hughes.” Here, Hedge Coke alludes to Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” (Whitman) and Langston Hughes’ “I Too, Sing America” (Hughes), songs that contain elements of musicality that are tied to a deep sense of history and national identity.

In “ America, I Sing You Back”, she uses music as a way to connect the past with the present, “I will sing her back, sing her back. Her own poems in the anthology contain the same elements of musicality that can be seen in the rest of the volume, as “Coke’s “songs” breathe her Native American and European ancestry, along with the vast geography of her experience” (Van Buren).

As both editor and contributor, Hedge Coke worked to illuminate the important work of poets of diverse backgrounds and heritage. In Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Allison Hedge Coke brings together “Indigenous poetic voices from across the Americas in a single volume” (Brown 258). The Musicality of Landscape and Identity in “Platte Mares” and “America, I Sing You Back” By Erin Cheatham

Musicality meaning