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…
Tag: indigenous philosophy
Day 13:Ucluelet, Her Sea Cans
once upon the wild coast, before we turned back we stopped in ucluelet, whipped by rain and there, inside linked sea cans, the ocean denizens of barkley sound, of clayoquot sound of rocks and shoals around the town, tankbound lay in shallow water. touch them, know them, listen to fond stories of this seastar or…
Day 12: With Wolves On Strings
with wolves on strings modern marauders fill these streets of morning. we are not out for blood.
Day 10:1491
my brother calls we talk about 1491, the book about how it may well have been here before the migrants came now labelled explorers, let’s be clear they were often soldiers displaced. spain had ended the moorish centuries young men surplus to army needs, might find passage to something new. we talk about porous borders,…
Day 8: Opening
driving down to red deer in alberta’s april, sepia dry the smell arrives first through closed truck windows ageless, immediate sour tang somewhere there, toward the westering sun tractor and disker pull open the season generations of memory, cell by cell leap to the ready; how we have changed but how we remain tuned to…
Day 2: sun, belatedly
So, having decided to do 30 in 30, i was immediately sidetracked by the sun. Day 2: Vancouver Sun we are the improbable light of the future. would my father see us that way? his grand daughters on the path ahead of me, hazel and blonde we’ve been here ten days and no rain every…
Skirt, The Issue: A Moment to Address the Headdress
I go out with the regalia I’ve earned – usually, a pen and book of some sort, because I’m a writer. I know that having the pen and book doesn’t make me a writer; using them does.
Skirt: The Issue – Part Two
Fist-Fight at the Sunrise Ceremony, circa 1996. Okay,there wasn’t any fist fight. Not out loud. Not with physical fists. But, i wager that, on some level, it looked just like a fist fight. What it was billed as was an interfaith ceremony. I was attending because i was working, at that time, with a Traditional…
Skirt: the Issue – Part One
Illegal religions make for subterranean ways of saying things. That’s the only way these religions can survive. And sadly, just as humans exhibit a natural pull toward organising our spiritual lives, we seem to find it al too easy to make the jump from sharing and coordinating our impulse to acknowledge Deity, to proscribing the…
Haunted by I Love You
I will never forget finding the page where somebody wrote, ‘I LOVE YOU! That’s WHAT MATTERS!’ with a small broken heart drawn beside it. It hurt, physically, to see that, because i could feel how that writer felt, and the hopelessness of that being the only way that writer felt safe to declare his/her feelings….
Martha Plus 100: thoughts on de-extinction
Well, September 1st was the 100th anniversary of the death of the last known Passenger Pigeon. I was in Toronto in June, recording live poetry videos with Jorge Antonio Vallejos, aka Black Coffee Poet. I’d learned that Mimico, a modern Toronto area placename, comes from Omiimiikaa, ‘Place of the Wild Dove’ in Ojibwemowin. Jorge mused…
Prairiepomes 