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.

Summer Pallette

Summer Pallette

Four days ago Earth gave me frozen ground beneath my feet
in crusted old winter white
and for just a mile ride in the car, frozen fingers, too,
and pinched toes and I had to pull my fingers up into the palms of my gloves.
Three days ago I woke up to Earth floating in a fog, covered in a grey cloud.
In a universe apart, dull and alone, rain misted,
then heavier it fell and soon it was two days ago.
The rain washed and washed and scrubbed until the face of old winter was white and glazed,
slippery clean and down to layers frozen there when winter began.
Yesterday I awoke to a day already begun.
Running, tumbling clouds crossed the sky taking turns with the sun in my eyes.
Winds blew so fierce I feared for the trees
and could almost see roads towel-dried.
Where snow banks the day before had receded, grass appeared roadside in tufts here, inches there, sprung up like the fur on the tail of a cat who has finished with her bathing, and I stayed in.
Then today, after she had roused and shaken herself awake,
Earth sat back, majestically, to study herself and prepare a summer palette
in silent pastel sun, slightest breeze, bits of moisture, dots of clouds.
Tomorrow, I surmise from dreams of summers gone
When sun-baked tar beneath my feet sent me tippy-toed,
the cool green grass will offer up its refuge
And nights indoors will feel like out, and outside feel like in.

The Ancestors

The Ancestors

The hosts are hovering
Above my mother’s
Grim and gaping grave
From above her grim and gaping grave
They can hear her smothering
Her footsteps lessoning
And they wave
They don’t say where she’ll be going
Don’t tell us from where they came
The hosts just keep hovering
Above my mother’s grave
Their voices whisper high and calling
Along trails that split the trees
She’s more than ready for this journey
For the grave she dug so deeply
She’ll go gasping, now relenting
To that place she’d always seen
In visions, strong and holy
Of the one she called Mary
In the light at trail’s end
To where she’ll meet the ancestors again

Childhood

Childhood

I saw the fireflies in the night,
recall sleeping on the ground near elders and cousins,
knew the fullness of our supper washed in water near the shelter,
gathered with them at the fire to hear the stories of the elders,
heard their laughter.

There were presents for the stranger when we gathered all together.
Needles spilled from pines between the houses that she built us.
Daughters cowed to mothers
Who cowed to elders, never others.
Knolls stood out in glory in amber autumn bluster.
Spirits shaped in hollows in the heaviness of twilight.
Deer and rabbit slept outside the ring of firelight.

There was god out on the landscape poised and full with knowing.
God was there at night in secret rites of elders
I flew with breezes stirred in trees that towered,
was intent on signs of lodgers in the fallen pines rotting,
believed that I was whole with every change approaching.

Now I’m not certain, I’m not so sure
I don’t see them anymore.
Now I know I didn’t know,
And I’m not well.
Time and death have left me in darkness.
I can’t reclaim it, I’m confounded
And surrounded by these ghosts.