Fifth World Journal

Well, it has been a year since Prime Minister Harper officially apologised for the Residential Schools and all their atrocities. Have things changed?

I can’t see any difference yet; but i go around hopeful, listening in case i hear a different tone in people’s voices. I am known for my wishful thinking, but i do think just possibly, there is a slight awareness that wasn’t there before. I think it matters that non-Native people can’t so easily say they don’t know, never heard of it, had no idea this happened, let alone that it has a lasting impact.

Of course, the radio coverage i heard this morning mentioned - as usual - the impact of the schools on our native communities; as if this is not something that has damaged all of Canadian society. That’s the next step i’m hoping for, that people will recognise how the damage wasn’t just to Aboriginal people, but that everyone is affected. And no, i’m not saying there’s grounds for everyone to get compensation. That rightly belongs to survivors, though of course it is not healing. What i am saying is  that everyone is the poorer for Native communities having been so brutalised. We all live with the impacts. Not just in the obvious ways, when we as a society reap the whirlwind of crime, poverty, social welfare costs…. but we have all lost the languages that are lost. We have all lost the stories, the medicines, the songs, the history of connection to this land.

On this first anniversary, i am thankful anew for the things that endure, and for the ones who have kept the languages, culture ways, stories, songs and medicines alive. Here’s hoping for a meaningful renaissance.

In my own yard, the pine i planted this day last year is thriving, though growing only slowly. Slowly. That’s the way healing can be when the wounds are grievous. That’s the way broken trusts are rebuilt. That’s the way scars heal. The way forests regenerate. The way a deep root gets set.

All My Relations

AMS

The light comes up in a particular way around here, depending on the time of year. Now it is June, close to the apex for how much light we might expect of the sky on any given day. To watch the dawn arrive is something - all the different ways that can happen for a person. Did you watch the night through, protecting one you love? Did  you wait in fear, praying for the light? Did you leap out of bed because you could not bear to be sleeping through this miracle of translation, shadow into colour in a dance unparalleled? Were you running all night? Dancing? Loving? At war? What sound awakened you? Or was it the silence? All around the world, a long indrawn breath, as the sun reaches into dark and dreaming.

Were i a different person, i’d be out there already, in the cold dew, under the clearest sky, taking the covers off the tender ones who needed guarding from the called-for frost. The much-exaggerated frost, to judge by the view from my window.

Tonight i walked alone. In joy? Or in sorrow? Rage? Pain? Peace? Yes, yes, sure. Throw in envy, lust, pride, selfishness, greed, celebration, clarity, humiliation, longing; imagine it however you like. Here are some poems for you.

One:

the evening sky is red and north-listing
lopsided with fading light

one bird wings through
empty blue

air
there is air
and there is a body
walking through air
a part of it, but apart

cut a figure from shadow and reflection of warmth
the day has passed
this wingbeat
meets neither resistance nor reception
no horizon
just the fade

like a dancer in a frenzy
with no partner
a spectacle
nothing spectacular

just a bird
alone
evening darkening
you can’t see what kind of bird

it does not matter

did she hope to touch the sun?
it is gone
nothing but a lopside of fading light now
wing etched
unspecified bird
empty blue
…..

Two:

Long ago on a gravel road
Dust and uncaring dampness
Realisation that there was
No spirit waiting
To whisper comfort and right answers
Just the road
Feet
Breath
A choice to make
Own
Live with

A father’s passing
Sets you on your feet
Whether you were ready or not

Walk
Fall

A choice to make
Open road.

….

Three:

why not learn to sing?

…..

Four:

A lover
said he’d asked his mother
Why she was so cool
To a person he cared for

Angrily, passed on her reply:
To frighten off the faint-hearted.

I laughed. This is not romantic, it turns out.
I walk alone, showing my teeth to the wind.
Perhaps if i’d tripped, fallen gracefully
Peered up fluttering
…..

Five:

War mare

Genghis Khan and his conquering hordes
Rode mares to war
Drank mare’s milk sipped mare’s blood
From swift little cuts

Courage heat pace
Honed to a point
Of contact
The deal is
Relentless speed

Imagine something more unlikely
Than a war mare imagining
upon her skin
apple blossoms feathering down
…..

six:

warm air

when the air is warm
you could promise anything
anything at all

words are so light
…..

As for the rest, let it be. If everybody heard about the glories to be seen, imagine the roads, paths, streets, the very wilderness choked with poets straining toward some solitude like constipated bears, and all the happier that there is an audience to notice their lone splendour.

Hi readers. It’s been a long time. I’ve been launching Fifth World Drum, and caught up in a whirl on other fronts as well. Been thinking about this next post for some time now. Here it is:

Risen, As On Wings

This Easter, we went to Saskatchewan and spent the weekend with my mother and sister, and sister’s family.
Friday, driving down, we took the backroads. This lead us among antelope and swans at rest, under soaring vees of migrating waterfowl written across the sky.
Saturday morning, i stepped outside, just to survey the morning. And there came a loud an joyous cry overhead, and resurrection blessed me with its shadow.
For there, among the mighty vee of Canada Geese, were numbers of white bodies, soaring on distinctively black-handed wings. Whooping Cranes, sharing the airways. Over the weekend i saw multitudes of mixed vees, and my sister taught me how to recognise the Whoopers’ distinctive voice among them, even before seeing their unmistakable forms in flight.
Resurrection.
In the 1940s, the number of Whooping Cranes known to survive in the wild was less than two dozen. I saw easily that many the first day. And then dozens more.  Why did they survive? In part because we humans made reparation for having been a decimating force in their lives. We committed to their recovery, though the odds were desparately long. And we innovated – we fostered Whoopers with Sandhill Crane families, among other measures taken. A handful of dedicated people had the vision that Whoopers could survive and recover, and the courage and commitment to work to make that vision true. The rest, of course, is the work of the Great Mystery. Why cranes at all?  And why not?

Meanwhile, back home in the old downtown neighbourhood where i live, we are told that our schools are endangered. The populations served by our inner city schools are too small to be viable; we cost too much, and the better plan is to build new, expensive super-schools in outlying subdivisions, support more urban sprawl
We are told it’s for our own good not to have so many choices for schools we can walk to. We are told our kids – whose schools at present get extra funding specifically because so many are ‘high needs’  - are better off diffused into a larger population of unfamiliar cohorts, perhaps farther from home. And we are told that our neighbourhoods are better served by taking away the cornerstone of healthy family-neighbourhood interaction, the school.
Where are the people among us who will stand up and say, where there’s a will, there’s a way? And affirm that the problem here is not numbers, it’s will.
With political will to actually revitalise  city cores, we can easily do it. And it is imperative that we do. All the leading thinkers on sustainability, economic vitality and viability of cities know this, and declare it. The ancient cities of the world are ample evidence, thriving, dense, renewed over centuries.
We can do it here, too. We must do it. If we don’t, we are at best condemning our children to a mode of life that we know to be unsustainable – the suburban wasteland, more and more dependent on auto-culture, disconnected from others, weaned from interhuman interactions to virtual connection and thus vulnerable to dullness, emptiness and all kinds of exploitation, At worst, we are actively contributing to a way of developing and using our environment that is simply abusive – we don’t need to absorb more farmland for bigger houses; we don’t need to become more reliant on far-flung industrial agriculture for our food security; we don’t need to alienate our children from the neighbourhoods where we live.
Just the other day, i saw a low-flying vee of swans – low enough that there was no mistaking them for snow geese – right over the Italian Centre Shop, circling Giovanni Caboto park. I was walking, with my kid and our dear friends’ kid and his granna. We all saw the swans swing by, arrow north, disappear into the sky over our little old brick school.

On the occasion of the Dalai Lama’s marking 50 years in exile, two poems:

1 - for a podium

The Dalai Lama
got his salary
from the CIA
in the free-love 60s

Does this taint him?
Or cleanse them?
I type on a computer
factory-built
plastic
full of odd chemicals

And what of the trans-gendered
crocodiles swimming
in factory effluent?

And the cobalt mines in Congo
awash in coincidental war?

2 - speaking of silence

Dalai Lama
on the CIA payroll
in the peace and love 60s

he wrote of it himself
in his autobiography
being a man of peace
he had the grace to leave it to the reader
to consider the nature of his funding source
and at whose convenience that flow stopped

those who oppose war-hawking violence
carry books of his quotations

others point at military history

Mongolian men-at-arms

schismatic prism, gold

and god’s golden, many-armed franchisees

riding fields of wordless stone

anishinabe ikwe
often paid for my art by government
grants these days

i have  been told
by a man rallying for free Tibet
that what happened here does not compare
was hundreds of years ago,  is all over
and anyway,  not relevant
had i more grace and peacefulness
i would not have to finish this poem

which i cannot finish anyway
because i lack the words

om om om

all my relations

ams

Recently, i reconnected with an old school chum. We were student poets together, and he was instrumental in me running away to join the circus (which is to say, getting involved in theatre). Time and life moved us on, and he headed off to Toronto years ago. The other day, since i’m headed to Toronto on a book tour soon, thought i’d check and see if he’s still out there. He is.

And he’s writing about bees.

You may think that’s a funny thing to get joyful over, but reader, it makes me joyful. My old friend cares about bees; his mom has taken up bee-keeping, and he’s discovered an affinity, too.

When we were kids together, we moved in a kind of innocent space. We walked a lot, roaming the city at odd hours. We saw the pre-dawn light come up over Jasper Ave as we slipped by various short-cuts down to the bare dust path that wound along the river bank, before that trail was paved. We prayed at sunrise with one eyebrow raised, in the midst of an eclectic collection of souls celebrating the Harmonic Convergence, then walked back to my house for cornbread. And laughed about how, despite the Convergence, we still had a hard time singing in the same key together.

We tried the patience of our professor, a poet of quiet voice and circumspect demeanour; us with our prancing, punning, capering ways. But we didn’t just make poetry, we took it out, undisciplined and raw though it may have been, to coffeehouses, to campus radio - one memorable night, we escaped mid-way through a gig performing poetry at a skinhead bar, sat shaking our heads over herbal tea and cheese cake, proud of ourselves in a stupid way - we took it to whatever scant audience we could find. Which of course led to theatre.

I wanted theatre, and poetry, to be holy pursuits, to be the means by which i could serve as a world-healer. But i didn’t say it much, not out loud. People rolled their eyes at me enough as it was, weird farm girl in the city, untypical indian, kind of unfashionable, had no inkling even of the fundamentals of the language of the stage, what - were you raised in the bush or something? …. i studied, honed my craft, watched the brash young fellows do their thing, was the nice girl on the edge of the scene, bringing bread and grapes to rehearsal perhaps in ignorance of the proprieties of feeding on caffeine, nicotine, booze and sweat. My sis and i were the ones they all protected. One of them once said to me, at one of the few parties we attended, that he didn’t know why my sis and i were in theatre, we were obviously too sane.

And it was my little sis who pointed out to me, one evening as we watched our friends setting up a stage; Look, she says, he wants to be Jesus Christ. They all do. Every theatre guy wants to be Jesus. We weren’t either of us convinced that was a good thing, but the image stuck with me. Years later, i used it as the central idea of a song - maybe i’ll play it for you sometime. But for now, i just mean to tell you that this friend was one of those guys who were there.

And then he moved on. He was writing about angels a lot. He was adopting a streetier style. He was moving into a darker, more chemical, more industrial kind of space, and the points of connection eroded between us.

And now, all these years later, he tells me he’s not so sure about angels anymore. Having investigated them in many ways, he’s come to suspect they are largely invented by people, to serve people’s ends. Bees, though, he says, bees he can believe in.

And I thank God, by whatever name S/He/They flies, humming the songs of life that sustain us all. I thank god because one more person has taken up the call to love and honour the bees. Because maybe i didn’t need to have said it out loud for it to be true - we do this writing thing, in whatever medium, to whatever level, because of love, love for the world, and because we want to serve as world healers.

Something to sing about, as i bumble into my day.

All my relations

ams

I am a dumpling of rage

in your complacent soup.

I am the meaty nugget of contention

bumping up against the greens

the shrimp, the other flavours.

Look at me:

ruffle-edged, a little soggy

but, all the way through,

peppered in my meat

gristly, bristling with fire.

This is the truth:

without me

you’d never order the soup

let alone eat it.

I am the War Wonton.

This weekend, i briefly attended centennial celebrations at my daughter’s school. In the midst of the retrospective slide show, there was a picture, from about 1914, of young soldiers, so young. One among them looked no more than 14. But what can i say about that, that hasn’t been said before, and much better? Is war just something we do? Mate, migrate, migrate to mate - these drives are apparent in all creation. Can’t figure out war. It makes as much sense as a ranting dumpling.

best

ams

It’s a fine morning here in Edmonton; cold, sure, but the winter is leaving us, the sun is higher and lasts longer, so the cold feels lighter. And the magpies say it’s Spring. Out my window, i can see a huge flock of them carrying on like songbirds, swooping and volleying in extravagant formations from tree to tree. It’s the first Magpie Marriage Meeting i’ve ever noticed.

Is this how the rest of nature sees us? Mostly loud, obnoxious thieves, plundering the garden; shotgun bait, had they opposable thumbs; but then, some clear morning when the light begins to promise warmth, we suddenly reveal our romantic side. Look, we, too, sing out our love and desire. We, too, can loop and arc in delightful displays patterned on the larger dance of all life. We have a heart. We want what is good. We seek and delight in love. Worth keeping.

Magpies also always remind me of my brothers. And Ian Tyson. And the golden light of morning on the backroads in the Peace Country. I was riding shotgun with my brother Don, going to meet our other brother at the truckstop in Rycroft; from there, with the rest of the crew, we were off to a remote lease to do some oilfield work.  One day, just maybe, we’ll get around to writing a musical about it; but that’s a whole other story.

Meanwhile, this is the scene: we’re on the road. We’re watching a group of deer - muleys, as i recall - playing back and forth across the road ahead. They see and hear us coming. Most of them make up their minds, pick a side of the road and clear the way. But there’s one young buck who just can’t decide, left or right, north or south, with one half of the group or the other. My brother does his best, but it’s no use - the buck, with an easy, clear path on one side, leaps at the last minute, straight into us. Is it confusion? Dare-devil pride? Who knows what compels him to dash his body to death on the truck.

We do our best to bid him a respectful farewell, and drive on, the morning quiet now in a different way. Back at home, our eldest sister is walking toward her own death, just as inexplicably. We can see it coming, we’re steering for all we’re worth in case there’s a way to coax her away from the speeding truck. And the deer’s body lies cooling in the growing warmth of a summer morning, and the sun is swinging up into the blue. There’s nothing we can say, so we turn the radio on.

Now, i love Ian Tyson, for a lot of reasons. His songs and his mellow mellow voice are truly golden. Except for one song. Which we heard for the first time just then. Mr. Tyson, against common sense, came on the radio singing something like reggae, the music and phrasing so at odds with all we expected from him. “Magpie, you’re an early riser…” It’s a wonder we heard the song, we were laughing so hard. We rode gusts of hysteria into the parking lot in Rycroft, and leaned against the truck, wiping our streaming eyes for a moment before we went in.

There was a moment of silence when we caught our brother’s eye, a moment when we tried to keep straight faces and dignity in the crowded restaurant. But only one moment, and then brother Stan  burst into “MMMagpie…” and we all dissolved again into helpless laughter. He’d heard it too, driving up to meet us. Over a big country breakfast with bottomless coffee, we snickered and snorted and debated, was the lyric “you’re a bold chastiser” or “a bull chastiser” - the image of a magpie scolding a bull (in a faux-Jamaican squawk) makes me laugh now, seven and a half years later, and it lofted us up that morning.

I don’t know if Mr. Tyson would understand, were i to say to him, Thanks. Thanks for doing something so ridiculous. Everyone’s always saying, and i do agree, that you are an artist of legendary status. You deserve the many honours and accolades you’ve received. But, whether you meant it so or not, your magpie song is an utter howler. Thank God. And thank you.  “Coyote in the sky….” Hee hee hee.

Outside, the Marriage Meeting has whirled on down the street. Spring is coming. Renewal is always an option.

All My Relations

ams

Thinking today about the transience of (and trans-science of) culture, traditions, ways of signalling our awareness of the world, of attempting to harmonise with the natural cycles.

It’s Groundhog’s Day here. Euro-pagans might be celebrating Imbolc. It’s Candlemas for the Catholics. In Japan, Setsubun. All delightful, in their way. All reaching out toward the growing light in this Northern Hemisphere. The light is growing. The first cracks in winter’s grip raise up hope for another spring.

What did we do in the old times? In the times before the great immigration of Europeans began, in the times before the colonial onslaught, how did people here mark this time?

Consider the meaning of having to suppress, hide, abandon, lose ways of celebrating the growing light. Still, the Sun does not cease lengthening its transit, the Earth bends faithfully toward spring. Will i go forth mourning for all the lost richness of paths? Or root down by available means, cracking through the crust to the slumbering Earth, reach up toward the growing Sun, stretching out into the freshening air, cross the quarter on the wheel of the seasons, focusing on that simple and enduring truth: whatever the cultural ceremony of humans, the light is growing.

best

ams

Tornado

Her friend said she was like a prairie storm
Liable to thunder sudden floods tornado wind

The day we laid her spent body down
Ravens hammered the church skylight
Whirling black rain

So much love
Trapped

Deadly wound grew
For nine months
Over her heart

So much love trapped

Months we do not speak of
The storm we all endured

Her birth into the next world
Surprisingly like that last soft breath
After the storm so swiftly spends its force.

In loving memory of Catherine F. Sewell

All My Relations

ams