We have reached the halfway mark and the passionate pacifism of the six canto
is a protest against all forms of militarism, the fundamental threat
to our survival. It is not a moral imposed on the poem by the poet, but a challenge
of the north. The north is used via the poem as it confronts us with the vision
of hell, one that is humanity's own production. Unfortunately, there is no
time to read you the whole of that sex scandal at the end of which the poet needs
to step back and allow the poem to go in on itself and embark on a meditation
in order to recover its equilibrium and perhaps gain greater clarity about this
desperate inside. Seventh canto. Kompass and Circo. We have run circles around this
land, and in return the moon has run circles around us. Through Bush and Barg,
Madness leads us a dance of black flies and bears around the illusion that a way
is open that leads on. Fully, Deborah. Our circles shrink to astill point up north,
my love, where you follow tracks in the snow, you fail to recognize til you fall
to a cold embrace in the arms of a familiar Shanu final as a testament.
Fully the linage. We are each compass and circle drawing our solitary lives
clockwise on the ground, the needle trembles and points north to the invisible
center of a wheel of frozen water spinning top of the world, wobbling on an axis
intangible as a line of thought. The eye of gravity is without dimension, a point
in the mind through which we thread the cycles and epicycles of the stars to make
a universe. North, my love, is a craving of blood. Each year, the Ice Age returns
and staggers the woodchucks heart long, slow tiptoe across a frozen stretch
of time, the north wind blows world's butterflies of like tinted snowflakes
into drifts southward, drives omni muck into circles of defense, blanches weasel
and hair, and puts the Arctic turn to flight ten thousand miles down
the continental drift. Circles of survival drawn by the sun. Follow the North Star,
measure the angle above the horizon with the sextant in your eyes and chart your
course on the map of your dreams where all shows are conjectures. The seas we sail,
dance to the moon inside us, round of flame turned flash fully Lamya. Home
is a heartbeat away from completing the circle of knowing even the shortest line
between two points bends beyond belief. All our paths are crooked. The patterns
of the brain and of the blood circle, a hub of darkness and emptiness
of such splendor, that it must be a fiction of the grandeur, that it must be
true. The diameter of life is the joy of being, though its radius is pain.
Calculate its surface by the power of light of a rock. The Arctic Circle
is a threshold in the mind. Not its circumference north is where all parallels
converge to open out my love into the mystery surrounding us like a pack
of wolves charging, snarling, snapping in a winter night. Ice River, lake, mist,
cloud, rain, snow, ring of water, of water that holds together, all that multiplies,
grows, moves, breathers, dreams, plankton, starfish, pich, lizard, heron,
lemming horse, epicycles upon epicycles spinning on and off fungus further
and further cycles. Human history may disrupt but cannot break love knowing
ecstasy between the endless revolutions of galaxies and electrons, you and I threaded
through the eye of birth running circles around the north that holds our costs
close enough to the sun. To love. A rattlesnake widens its coils about the hot
loins of a summer day. The seventh canto is the central epiphanny of the country,
of the countries after the horrors of the six in the pit of human greed and folly.
It is as though we were whisked into the purity and clarity of Arctic air that
makes possible a larger and more penetrating view of our world.
The language becomes densely imagistic and ambiguities abound, which cannot be
paraphrased because they would withdraw and deny the reader the enlightenment
they harbor. A poem opens its heart and mind only in a personal dialogue,
but the reader with the text, its music needs to be played inside the mind so that
the reader can bring to bear his or her own experience and reflections.
This moment is filled with tranquility and invites contemplation, it occurs midway
in the overall structure of the poem, like like the eye of a storm preceded
by the furious brutalities of colonisation and followed by the violence that crushed
its victims. The title, Compass and Circles, gives the clue to what it is.
The poet's eye sees circles of the return of the seasons of the dance with of life,
with death, the evolution of species to name. But a few and some were embedded
in the poem is the compass that enables us to orient ourselves. The poem
is an embodiment of that compass. You have to exchange the intimacies of your life
with those in the life of the poem to find the compass, which is different for every
reader. The eighth canto, though I think of it as paired with the sixth,
has benefitted benefitted from the vision embodied in the seventh, it supplies
the object through which we see the Indian experience of the north
and the devastation brought by its invaders coming from the west. The title
of the eighth canto, Sundance Out of History is intended to also link
it to the fifth canto, how to build an igloo into history. It is necessary
to stress that nothing in this can do or any other or for that matter, in anything
else I've ever written. Nothing is meant to resurrect the racist romantic notion
of the noble savage individually. The First Nations people share with us
the joys and sorrows, the virtues and vices that come with being human.
But their culture is very different. A culture is born from the fundamental
mythologies that form a people's lives and mythologies in turn are born
from the exigencies and vicissitudes of the particular place in nature,
its geography, its seasons, its flora and fauna in which a community exists.
Mythologies are existential necessities because their narrative provides answers
to the four fundamental questions of human existence. Who are we? Where did we come
from? What happens to us at death? What is the nature of the forces that determine
events in the cosmos and in our lives? It is these answers that constitute
the threshold across which we enter of psychic and in that sense a spiritual
space in which all things are assigned the proper place, the fierce experience
of the north in the face of interminable nights, bitter cold, harsh winds
and blinding light inevitably gave birth to a culture very different from our own
one that is derived from a more honest, more courageous confrontation with cosmic
realities. Canberra's North explores the implications of this experience and its
effects. The eight focuses on the North American Indians, as represented
by the Kiowa Warrior and Medicine Men Sit Down Care also known to us as Sitting
Bear. Who was shot and killed by his guards after he chewed the flesh off
his hands to slip out, to slip off his handcuffs and escape, the refrain
of the poem is my version of a Kiowa death song that he reportedly sang as a prisoner
on a wagon on his way to jail before he attempted to escape and was shot.
Eighth canto, Sundance out of history. Faces painted into frozen masks,
12 dancers beat the drums about the village fire inexhaustible. As the spokes
of the season's wheel circling the sun, tranz of a million voices and syncopated
hands, ring of chants growing larger outward from where the pebble of light
troubles the knights come, black water's growing heroically against all the odds
of history and winter circle of footprints for a future archeological find. Oh, son,
you remain forever and we must die. Kevin Okocha holds sway in the territories
of eternal ice and Ben's whatever reaches up back down to the ground. Around
the council fire, the sacred cow limit passed from mouth to mouth, they squatted
erect cedars, weighing their fate in the balance of their spirits. Our hearts
divided between the Bloods rush and the roots of their tribe, should they trade,
but the guards assigned to them for ink and paper. Treatises to force them
from their hunting grounds for generous gifts of blankets, gunpowder, smallpox
and rum. Should they fight battles in a war already lost or should they move north
to make their home in a winter wilderness beyond the reach of history? Oh, moon,
you would remain forever. And we must die north is where the icemen rangers blind
against wisdom when the ageless wind sings hard in winter woman's hair. A Mohawk
chief crossed an ocean far beyond the wildest dreams to take the measure
of the great white father, his power and his glory. But he wasn't fooled, he turned
back from Boswells venal city to his people, where River Song and Bird Flight
to unite for Peace. He crossed a sea of trees on a subject important to human
to the human race. But here in Franklin's bustling city, he was fooled. He came
for peace, they signed for peace, and then at fallen timbers, broke, scalped
and raped a treaty into treachery. All stars, you will remain forever and we must
die. A white cloud left its home in the north to drive away in the black cloud
that guards our big sleep by the owl. What did the general say, the easiest way
to exterminate an Indian is to civilize him. Naked, savage, no, no blood
in upstream salmon or a hawk on the wing at home in the federal give and take
of feeding mating day. Stocking up with a balance of eons between blizzards and heat
waves darkly in the still of nature to endure is to belong. As the sheer drop
belongs to the waterfall, not by mastering the tree do you harvest its fruit,
but by submitting proudly to its season's. Oh, Earth, you remain forever, and we must
die 12 dancers will about forked bolds till they are the dance, the closed circle
between spring and fall. Scourge of white history, like winter, it's powers glitter
with the icy designs of conquest, slippery as the greed that guides it through
the night of their delusions. Shooting star of the show in the Shawnee tribe,
he saw the long knives flashing and recognized the 17 council fires
in the flag. Footloose with his brother, the Prophet. They walked the dreams,
moonrise through Wabush into a valley of Kentucky, rifles that never took an Indian
prisoner slaughter at the terms, but they come to disappeared in a legend of blood.
Hassan, you will remain forever and we must die. A storm struck fire in the heart
of a sycamore. A spider danced against the bitter frost myth turned to ashes.
Slowdowns of hunters around their prey, they had long left the paths of innocents
on the other side of dreams, the trillions greeted summer. Then, as now,
they were children in the spangled Bush playing the cruel games of survival
carried courage was counted in scalps. Yet they listen to the song in the stone,
watch the wind dance with the leaves, and told the deer whose skins droned
on the drum about the arrows. Joy. The aim is in the bow and flight, its fullfillment
feathered and moccasins. They moved out of history by the last kill. Oh, moon,
you remain forever, and we must die, a circle of children danced faster
and faster, rose above hunger and up till they became stars and wikinews white
trail. Summer was a ceremony between TPE, Tomahawk and Canoe Sundance,
Modern's dancers for hunt and harvest feet, stamping the orbits of stars
on the ground, drums calling their TPIMs into a circle tilted against the wind.
Each was built on a cone of poles, tall and tapered as white spruces, cupping
a fire their lives with mirrors of a larger world. The north wind brought
winters south and wrapped their wigwams in furs of snow. Balance of millennia
destroyed forever by an alien history. All stars. You remain forever and we must die.
After Quiñones Stone monster crashes over the edge of Niagara Falls, the laughter
of loons will shiver the air of this Northland still. Certain key.
Sitting there. Seventy years old, he bit and tore the flesh of his own hands,
stripped them down to the bone till he could slip off the handcuffs. And die
a free man at point blank range. Have you ever seen the blood stump of a beaver's
foot in a steel trap? It was left there, gnawed off by an animal that knew its
place between the river and the tree, even in despair. The red skin knew all things
are home to the spirit, even the white scourge of history and winter. Worth.
You remain forever and we must die in the beginning, the court, the sun in a net
of clouds, but the sky shook and cast the hunters to the ground. Hassan. You remain
forever and we must die. The three countries that follow continue the quest
for the true north in different ways. The ninth is called Breaker's of Ice
and focuses on Arctic explorers Rasmusson, Peary and Franklin, among and among
and I quote, an Arctic armada of adventurers trapped forever in winter.
Memories of daring beyond belief. Ice blocked more firmly than the season mast
and yards. The fossil skeletons of pterosaurs washed clean and preserved
in the stone, soapstone wind ice blinking at them from the sky. Their captains
and crews scrambled to reach the shores of their conjectured dreams on the other side
of this no man's north. Flayed by blizzards to the skin broke into blisters
to let 60 below the flesh turned to ice and slowly melted bluegreen
into putrefaction by the cold fires of desperate camps. The poem celebrates
the explorer's courage, their daring, the Enduro durance as they confront
the ultimate challenge, the North becomes identified with winter and winter
represents death, the journey that set out to discover the geography and the nation
acquires new allegorical dimensions. Given the persistent mythic undertones
from the beginning of the canvas, this should come as no surprise. But while
death is given its victories, they are temporary, for death is only the other
side of life. And so the pilot can assure us that, and I quote, not the knife,
the voice triumphs over death. The north is a condition of the south. The wind
seems in the teeth of winter, a native song to the rattle of bones as I sing
Summer to a Dying Heart. The 10th Canto is titled Where the Great Spirit speaks
and deals with the human experience of the prairies, the power moves from the time
before human beings and tells of, and I quote, periodic revolutions over and over
from Cambrian to place to seeing epic struggles painted over each season,
layer upon layer upon load, each scene buried and reconceive every hundred
million years or so and finally cast in stone by nature's determined hand.
That's nature shaped, the magnificent flat open spaces under a gigantic vaulted sky.
It is the vastness and emptiness of the prairies whose eternal silence the wind
holds so that it seems to reverberate with voices, with the echoes of the grand
mystery of the universe. The Indian tribes heard in the wind the voice of what
they called the great spirit who gave the province its name. The name is probably
derived from the Indian money to bow meaning path of the Great Spirit,
which in turn is probably inspired by the lanes. The wind treads across grassland.
The poem records the arrival of the First Nations people, as I call it, again,
the Assiniboine pitch that dips into summers that brought wild mustangs north
to make them conquerors of a land that had long conquered them. Blackfoot and Cree
rode their big dogs to round up Buffalo, whose skulls were altars at the Sundance
honored for their gifts of life. End of quote. In this passage, a theme resurfaces
that asserted itself in the very first CANDU, namely that the North is no country
for a masteries and that the sky is master of us all, whereas is the native Indian
peoples understood themselves as living as part of the living web at the mercy
of nature. The white people came to conquer and be master of nature
until the voice of the Great Spirit was lost. I quote. Somewhere in Ruperts land,
somewhere between four to move up and the Cypress Hills, the Evilenko Mass Leape,
somewhere between the first soakings, somewhere between the first Kirk settlers
slaughtered by the Abu and the last bison shot for pemmican and sport. Greed,
poisoned, love debauched the innocent. And sent the messiah of the city
to the gallows. There is much history woven into the fabric of this poem,
some of it public and readily accessible to the student of Canadian history,
but some of it gained on more winding paths of coming to know end. And even
I would find it difficult to extricate each strand airport stores,
informations and impressions from every possible source books, travel diaries,
conversations, etc. and they have to trickle into the subconscious areas
and become part of the mind before they can become part of the stuff
of which the poem is made. Part of the creative process, this must not be
a retreat into privacy, but an offer of insight to each reader according
to his or her level of learning. One of the core realizations of the foregoing
passage is that commercialization is at the heart of our dilemma in the very act
of poisoning, what is supremely human about us, namely love. The power of money
gives us the illusion of being masters, masters of the land, masters of our fate,
masters of the world, an illusion that persists, though its bankruptcy
is becoming more evident by the day now. The poem has its own way of articulating
what the North teaches us. I quote, Only in passing can the Tigerlily bloom.
The prickly rose flower and the sod busting Croker's count the seasons. Can
I sing to you of the great spirit that speaks to noble nomads and settlers
in the winds of change? The 11th canto kaleidoscope of School of St.
Kaleidoscope of Stone evokes the Rocky Mountains as it follows Alexander
Mackenzie, who and I quote, set out from Lake Athabasca and followed the River
of Peace in the company of Alexander the Scot, equipped with Compass Quadrant
reflecting pan and bottled mercury, paddled with the explorer's fury through
canyons and gorges to find a chink in the stone armour of this continent opening out
to the sea. Their journey of exploration to reach the Pacific Ocean
was an extraordinary feat of endurance and fortitude in all manner of violent weather
and pursued by swarms of insects, they had to canoe rapids and cross mountain range
ranges that taxed their strength to the limit when they finally reached
their goal. On July 2nd, seventeen hundred and ninety three, after an almost
superhuman ordeal, the animosity of local Indian tribes forced them to flee
and return to their winter quarters at Lake Athabasca. Since the poem declares,
quote, A mountain is a map of the geography of life. It's peak, the north
of all endeavour, the journey of the two Alexanders and their crew becomes symbolic
of and I quote again, desires not on journey beyond the wall that ends
the world. The all sorry that desires northern journey beyond the wall,
that ends the world across the heights of dreams and imagination, down the other
side of life's watershed to Kathee through a chaos in stone. The realization that
a mountain is a vertical manifestation of the horizontal horizontal geography that
culminates in the Arctic north is a fruit of the labor of writing this poem.
I imagine mountaineers who have climbed some of the tallest peaks locked
in eternal ice and snow have experienced up in that rarefied air and blinding light
a shift in consciousness as they contemplated the world below.
Stacy Ellison, the first American woman to climb Mt. Everest, said in an interview.
Climbing forces you to come face to face with yourself, to be honest with yourself.
Not surprising in literature. Visions are often granted to protagonists in elevated
places, a mountain, a tower, a lighthouse. This is one of the core meanings
of the north to which the persona of the poet of Cantos North pays court
and tribute. The North is an epiphany on the human journey. In classical antiquity,
the north was a mythical region since no one had ever been there. They called it.
It was located at the top of the world and was believed to be a magical place
because above it, the constellation of the Great Bear Arktos in Greek circled forever
without ever setting in the poetry of both Homer and his IT. There are references
to a legendary paradise located at the northern extremity of the Earth.
It was said to be inhabited by a race of immortals, the hyper baryons so named
by the Greeks after Borias, an icy wind and hyper meaning beyond
because they are Arctic paradise, was surrounded by a chain of mountains that
protected them. As Robert Macfie tells us in the last imaginary place, quote,
from the frigid blasts of the north. Wind and weather, however, bobbins with us able
to enjoy an eternally pleasant climate in which there were no seasons and the trees
bore fruit year-round. Their lives were passed in music, dance, serenity
and comfort, untroubled by workups, strife or disease. The TrueNorth is an almost
exact negative of this dream vision, yet for this very reason. It is also the place
where true understanding is to be found, its extremities in light and space,
for the mind to confront itself and to accept the inevitable. It's icy winds
barks with the voice of the cosmos. Of the four fold forces that rule all things
past, present and future in a universe that is forever winding down as
it is gearing up, humanity has been granted a temporary abode in this world
of perpetual transformation, an opportunity to quote from Canta five
to build our homes into homes of light and endure the silence. Yet in a different
perspective, the North can indeed be seen as paradisiacal, namely in that over time
the forces of nature have established an equilibrium between competing
manifestations of life, a harmony that embraces birth and death, laughter
and tears, not as antagonistic, but as co-dependent. The human migrants
into the Arctic learned to comprehend and accept that fundamental truth
about existence. Given the choice between integration, sorry, given the choice
between integration and extinction, they chose to become an integral part
of the web of life which they recognized as fragile and precious. In my play,
A In the Sun and in it boys sets out in the midst of winter to hunt the sun as
he moves from darkness to light after a polar bear has killed his father. He comes
to understand life as a passing configuration of opposites in which there
are no beginnings and no ends, only transformations. At the beginning
of the play, a raven circles the stage. Here are the first two stanza of what
he sings with a sinister cackle. White is black and black is white. Arctic winter,
arctic night sun, wind, icewind wolves at bay, man and beast. Winter's prey,
Google and Goose have followed the sun, moose and Karibu are gone. Whitefish,
flatfish, whale and shark all have fled the howling dark. The Raven returns
at the end of the play to deliver the final stanza of this song. Snow, Wind,
Ice, Wind, Wolves at bay, mind and sorry, snow, wind, ice, wind, wolves at bay,
man and beast. Winter's prey. White is black and black is white. Arctic Winter.
Arctic night. When among the early inwith people, a member of the clan died,
the next child born thereafter was given the name of the deceased. This idea
of transmigration acknowledges nature. And ultimately, the entire cosmos as
a perpetual recycling process is very different from the Christian notion
of the supremacy of the human animal and its resurrection into a world that
is the very opposite not only of our own world, but of everything we know
about the universe. In a mind boggling hubris, missionaries imposed this bizarre
belief on the Inuit people and thereby contributed significantly
to the destruction of their society and their culture. If people can survive only
with the mythology that puts it in harmony with the realities of its environment.
Ironically, at the very moment that we are discovering the North both as direction
and destination, we are destroying a geographic incarnation. The Arctic, as
we know, have known it is dying under the impact of global warming. I hope this will
not prove to be a metaphor for the fate of humanity, our blind obsession with power,
pleasure and possession is making the habitat on which we depend
for our survival and inhabitable. Perhaps in doing so, we are merely acting out
the law of nature. But the North urges something else on us, urges us to cross
the threshold in the mind. That leads us to a humble acceptance of the laws
of the North. Unless we open our minds to it, our survival is in doubt. The final
count is both retrospective and prospective. It is largely composed
of historical voices, voices that have been heard in previous Cantus
and some that have not. Well, knowledge of where these voices come from enriches
the experience of the poem. It is not essential to understanding the argument
into which the words are woven. But I'll identify two speakers who have nook
and that's inward woman who became a shamon of great power after she was struck
by a ball of lightning. And sorry, and Tatang Imani walking Buffalo, a stony
Indian from Alberta who traveled the world in the first half of the last century as
the spokesman of his people. Let their voices stand for the First Nations as
they urge us to listen to the trees, talk of the circle's life draws
between their roots in darkness, in the sky and to the stars. Converse with
the hills in the night voice of spinning silences. And let the boat have the final
word. Singing Winter So Forever into spring. 12 Kanta. 12TH Canto singing
The North into Love. I am the voice measuring this land and its people excuse
me, I'm going to stop for a minute because of the time I'm wondering whether I should
just read what I think. It's OK if you're just. I'm wondering. It's no it's no
problem. Are you sure that's OK? I'm getting tired of listening to my voice.
That's a problem. No. All right, start again with 12. Can you give me a timing,
please? Then we started five, four, three, two. 12TH Canto singing The North
into Love. I am the voice measuring this land, and it's people crying
in a wilderness of voices bent on burying us all in shame. Latitudes and longitudes
run circles around the north, more precise than the orbits of sun or moon,
but in rivers, mountains see grasslands in their places. Yet they cannot take
the measure of this land. Nor is the gold in the vaults of the unscrupulous
or the voice of charlatans elected appointed to their places. The measure
of people. We moved into the present, blessed by blessed by calloused skin that
slipped disc by frostbite, by rheumatoid fingers and gout knees, the indomitable
will pitched against the indomitable land, birth by death. Who has the measure
of so much living against the grain of all the woods and wethers of the north?
An invisible hand stirred, the light swept this morning across the lake, rolled up
the mist, a canvas white rose above the still water. It was as though eternity had
opened with one large eye bloodshot. It stared darkly at me. Still a flame lit
in my throat and I sang fits into a myth to startle the now well singing the north
into love words, warp silences and death reaches for route's. The wind has blown
the ashes of victors and victims east and west, across a million lakes and dreams,
there are voices lingering like some elusive scent, musty here,
and they are noxious, 54 40 or fight another Yankee Doodle down the river,
crooked as Napoleon and his continental boasts one deflated by stings of Haitian
mosquitoes, the other a frozen root to end all roots in another north land.
In the winter of our independence, the north is the graveyard of all ambition.
Silence has fallen like a blizzard on declaration scribe's commands all nonwar.
Remember Jacquier. Casey Cooey, buried under the same snow that has long become
home to their speakers, this country talks forked tongues. The Mozzie's anglais.
And the Peterloo massacre, the security forces and the egalitarian guillotine
naturalized in a ceremony of freezing rain and forest fire where Eden is an epidemic.
The rhetoric is green, but winter takes our oath. I am all that remains draw loom
of words where I unravel the unremembered and weave it firmly across the warp
recorded in textbooks. History is a canvas whose strength is in the waft spun
from the heart's fiber by the battle of the mind not to sail the changing winds
in all directions, but to travel north by love. On the elliptical course, the stars
burn into the sky. I am the vessel that carries the ashes of the past.
Into the future. I am the voice of Edward the Prince, whose tongue was a cat of nine
tails flogging his man to a pulp of blood for a faulty wig until the mutiny royal
barbarian who left his mistress Julie in Quebec, or the Irish savage Talbot sudden
in his city. Warb, Castle turning pine forests into an empire of wealth
and whiskey. I am not lying, little fool of an archdeacon plotting my compact
family machinations to defraud my my flock and my French compatriots. Straughan
and his gang perverting the course of justice to wash gold into the coffers
of their puny minds. The Atlantic spewed so many John Bolds ashore that those who
never meant to go beyond the sound of their church bells knew the time would
come to melt their spoons into bullets. When Wellington's officers declared
democracy here, an incipient mutiny of the ranks, the echo came from Acadia's coasts.
Mattered or what, Dunkel? Gone with the snows of yesteryear, the wind has many
tongues to harangue the forest, song of River, Song of Bird, Song of Silence,
never heard in steel, in the steel and stone woods of our city. Song of Dawn,
Song of Death, The Season Sing in every breath the Earth draws, the stars sing
every birth to sleep. But spinning on their pivot north, they will not dance
to the tune of any king or country. Nor will the land be Chettle to any privilege.
Winter calls out against us its riot squads to quell Autumn's inflammatory
demonstrations. I am the voice of Tatang money, I speak for all the tribes
whose treaties you have broken late at night in your cities are still the ghosts
of Redskins' come to crowd the streets with tales of slaughter. Wake up and count
your money quick as a buffaloes fart. Only the great spirit can count the rocks
in the mountains and the cones in all the spruce pain and cedars of this land.
Did you know trees talk? Of the weather of the circle's life draws
between their roots in darkness and the sky of you and the X. Listen. We burned
dead wood only. Wear the white skin have touched the earth. She cries out in pain.
Song of man crying out beyond the simple talking trees, knowing is the root
of singing and pain the fruit. I bear the profundis sense and silence Wordsworth
poem. I am the voice of my tongue can pierce the circle that holds my people,
the North has has sent me adrift, moving like seaweed in and out of Time's shores.
You brought us diseases to redeem us from flesh since. Did you know Rivers' Singh?
Of snow melts in the spring of fish flashing and dancing in the sun
of the freedom of waters, all odds of settling into winter's bones. The measure
of the land is the measure of the mind stones around from watching the sun
and moving in the orbits of galaxies. Birds build their nests in circles.
The wind worlds round and round, our igloos and teepees, our lives, the seasons
from birth to birds. The great spirit has shaped all things in roundness, listen
to the stars, converse with hoods in the night, voice of spinning silences. Let
the wind scatter winters wide, ashes like confetti to welcome the abominable
snowman, yesterday's ashes are tomorrows flowers. Today is the rain, the sea
and the soil. Spring comes wild on I am creation from words into love,
from knowing, dying, and come to praise the north, where all life converges
to open out again into another mystery. Yesterday's words are tomorrow's song.
I am always today the poem that remains the estuary is where the sea listens
to the land cave, where mouth, where the rain talks to the rocks. Centuries sift
into spaces between the lines of poems, between the campfires in an Ojibwe sky,
between you, my love and the north somehow falls and I dream I am because I see
winter so forever into spring. Thank you very much.