Sounds Of Foreign Silence
I am alone and sounds, here, are foreign
until I feel feather of memory
lift me home, carry me , dearly,
back home to where Jack Fish
are trying to become sky swimmers
in navy nights blanketed with season’s
deep purple dying sunset.
I am homesick for wolves howl,
Eagles’ spiral, wood smoke curling
through community hunkered down
for a night of cards and old country music,
laughter and Riverside Louis, singing
at the top of his lungs as he weaves
his sodden stitches towards another
all night visitation with voices
and broken bottles under bridge
where moonlight is his nightlight.
I am hungry for smoked, dried moose meat,
salted whitefish, twenty-four hour coffee,
and my sisters around my table
that holds Kleenexes and flowers
and camaraderie I have never had
since leaving, like lone wolf,
packing a bone off to begin new clan.
I do not hear loons here, like there,
where heart was stunned.
Nor does night hover shiver my soul
as it rides wide cool downdraughts
over lake and fringy forest. No ducks
can be heard nattering at night,
like old women discussing their day
around a boiling pot of tea.
How heart heads for home,
every chance it gets. I am,
in this, a granddaughter of Lesser Slave Lake
where I know grandmothers are searching
for me, to wrap their shawls
over my tired shoulders, in a comfort of kin
under ancestor’s dance as they hum
my name across Northern Alberta skies.
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