We are the land and so we come to each other
from far away. The eastern slope has maple leaves,
the crash of wave on new found land. Mes amis, our
question is: what does speaking in foreign tongues mean?
Pretending to be a people in the largest country
never fought in and for itself? Never a pogrom, nor a
gulag? But our reservation comprises death untraceable
for those found here by the Harpers of the nation,
the Borden’s, the Mulroneys, the Chief with his
jowly nation of Saskatoon, that sweet prairie fruit
that stained my hands from their picking on the cliff
where falcons stooped to knock me off. The falcons
called me twice each time they spoke, echo booming
the sandstone rock. I fancied only I could hear their
calling, and Alberta mountains with flakes round their
feet, the Yamnuskas, Kananaskis. I hear the names
Sarcee, Ponoka, the Trudeaus, and Stanfield, bagpipes,
their instrument of colonialism, and France where our
grands-pères died of the opening up of mustard gas;
we know of it in our placid land as how to make the water
pure. O my distanced friends, we have no other words than
what our mouths form on tongues. Those with teeth say:
Tsartlip, Muchalet, Tsawassen. Lakes are our only precious
thing: the open eyes of our country, Lake Winnipeg,
its hanging wave smacks our middle ground, Ukrainians,
the Mennonite, people with olden clothes, olden carts,
on way to olden towns, anywhere on our CP grid
flatness, then Banff Springs, Hell’s Gate, Fraser
and Thompson. sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½â€™s flesh drains itself of tears
to our western shore, where trails between cedars last
green millennia. The wooden heartbeat we know,
the way we cannot keep our feet within their
shoes, not Huckleberry, not Tom or Brautigan, but
Canadian. I sing the land relentless. We search for
the native drum that is this sa¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½. We start
so far away you cannot hear us coming.
Ìý
Notes:
1. The prairie falcon call has two equal notes: kree, kree.
2. Yes, Walt Whitman — I sing the body electric.
Ìý
— DC (Dennis) Reid