Pine

Pine

Long ago on starry nights now far away
after journeys out in shining sun
I slept where elders lay.

I listened, dozing, to word and song
until sleep took me into dawn.
I awoke one day to years gone from me
passed into aunts grown elderly.

I asked them my questions, which I know now
would matter deeply to me somehow.
But youth takes time to fall away
to the bigger questions that mark our way.
I let time go and now there’s left
No one to guide me in my quest
for old traditions and all that was done
on those dream-filled nights before the coming sun.

I was new – they were the old
And so their stories stop here, only partly told:
The baskets they made, the secrets they kept.
All that telling while this child slept.

I grew my own child, I kept a home.
I tended my fires for things unknown.
It took me so long to look behind
To want to learn more of my family line
Having lost big pieces of where I came from
I believed, as we all do, that time would go on.
Yet all have died now – almost all gone
Except an aunt and uncle – all long gone.

But they were the Mi’kmaqs, my family,
Who came to this land by the sea
To sell their baskets, to pick your crops
And this was where their tribal ways stop
With me, and my sister, there’s no one else speaks here, or can
About the Mi’kmaqs who came to stay
Here, by the sea, and still lived their way.
I know what then I learned
And for this I believe I have earned
The right to say my name is Pine.
My mother gave it to me before she passed – it’s mine.