did i mention i came to the city suspicious? after all every indian of a certain age (yes, indian, to frame this) knows that cities eat indians. of course, there’s the trick. i am anishinabekwe, lnuskw also, and polish by matrilineage. i came looking for some fabled southland that sang to me in dreams all…
Month: April 2016
Day 29: Spiritual Dissonance
is this cognitive dissonance? listening to Elder recount the ancient agreements, while reading the bombing of another Medecins Sans Frontiers hospital. is this even possible? Elder, to gather our teachings to gather back to our clear and gentle roots to be curious, creative, kind, and stand against the tide of plain, cowardly evil. to live, and…
Day 28: Migratory
overhead, but far cranes are riding on thermals city cruise singing.
Day 27: Bee Count
to discern the flow, the way that land likes to be what grows where, what light brings joy, what soil what drainage. all this, and counting bees fills spring days. five kinds this morning: lady bumble with her pockets full, honeybee sweat bee, fly bee; we bend astonished closer to nonchalant antics of one small chestnut…
Day 26: Blessing Song
when i first came to the city, my fear rode on my back cities don’t love indians. but i didn’t know better than to walk everywhere, because i could. and i began to admit there was life all around me, from the first crack of dandelion leaves up in march, through the stubborn winter song…
Day 25: Smoothing the Spirit
old houses hold on. the first day i saw this house i knew it was my home, knew its many windows. its east facing door was the first thing i painted. upstairs, early on, we removed that beige broadloom peculiar to quick flips. such old wood in some rooms refinished, but under the carpet, a ruin, old…
Day 24: River of Fire
In 1984, in the dark, on the backroad up from Emerson Trail, if you need to know exactly, we saw fire in the sky. my brother and i U2 hammering a yowl about A Sort of Homecoming i saw the coming time, when i would finally go around that big bend in the highway and fly out…
Day 23: Billie, Under the Moon
how do ceremonies work? what magic might be proper, i do not know, except that once, billie asked her aunties for advice about her heartache. billie on the cusp of nineteen, the moon something near full and trailing up into the opening in the sky, velvet shadows cast in heavy island grass. the quiz came from…
Bonus Poem:Moon Lune Luna Personal
Here’s the poem with which i started this year’s French/Spanish translation project. This is the version i collaged into a 3-language piece that i used to lure Madame Giselle Lemire into a crazy-fun trilingual performance experiment. Moon Lune Luna Personal En el fulcro Au point d’équilibre balance point between l’été y otoño la…
Day 19:Steady
it’s something you draw down from the stars so that you, too, become a cord tying earth into heaven.
Day 20: Changing Into Thunderbird
before an enthralled crowd, one anishinabe man explains the art of another; this copper thunderbird this morrisseau, the price he paid for vision, this gift with which he won for all of us a way to see that this land is rightly the nesting ground of binasi thunderbird. i sit in the back and wonder, so…
Day 21: Rain
i don’t cry for celebrities. they don’t know me. i don’t know them. i don’t want autographs. pay tribute by raising my own voice, however limited. but prince. rampant, pure fire. burn better and brighter grow deeper, higher, brighter if your work did its work. i didn’t know you. you didn’t know me. but there…
Prairiepomes 