DUMONT, Marilyn
Liquid Prairie
I miss the North Saskatchewan that runs through
those trees that shoot up black and grand
from its cool hips.
I miss those spruce that
defy the flatness,
gloat at the pressing-palm sky, the
loaded-rifle earth and
grow away.
I sit on this thin coast
but haven’t yet been on that belly of water
they call the ocean.
Not Just a Platform For My Dance
this land is not
just a place to set my house my car my fence
this land is not
just a plot to bury my dead my seed
this land is
my tongue my eyes my mouth
this headstrong grass and relenting willow
these flat-footed fields and applauding leaves
these frank winds and electric sky lines
are my prayer
they are my medicine
and they become my song
this land is not
just a platform for my dance
Helen Betty Osborne
Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you
it might turn out instead
to be about me
or any one of
my female relatives
it might turn out to be
about this young native girl
growing up in rural Alberta
in a town with fewer Indians
than ideas about Indians,
in a town just south of the 'Aryan Nations'
it might turn out to be
about Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall or Richard Cardinal,
it might even turn out to be
about our grandmothers,
beasts of burden in the fur trade
skinning, scraping, pounding, packing,
left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,'
left for white-melting-skinned women,
not bits-of-brown women
left here in this wilderness, this colony.
Betty, if I start to write a poem about you
it might turn out to be
about hunting season instead,
about 'open season' on native women
it might turn out to be
about your face young and hopeful
staring back at me hollow now
from a black and white page
it might be about the 'townsfolk' (gentle word)
townsfolk who 'believed native girls were easy'
and 'less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence.'
Betty, if I write this poem.
Let the Ponies Out
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
to have your breath leave, escape you, escape the
weight of bone, muscle and organ, escape you, to rise up, to loft,
till you are all breath filling the room, rising, escaping the white,
the white
sheets, airborne, taken in a gust of wind and unbridled ponies,
let the ponies
out, I would open that gate if I could find it, if there was one
to let you go, to drift up into, out, out
of this experiment into the dome of all breath and wind and
reappear in the sound of the first year’s thunder with
Chigayow cutting the clouds over your eyes expanding, wafting,
wings
of a bird over fields, fat ponies, spruce, birch and poplar, circling
wider than that tight square sanitized whiteness
you breathe in, if you could just stop breathing you could
escape, go anywhere, blow, tumble in the prairie grass,
bloom in the face of crocuses
appear in the smell of cedar dust off a saw
in the smell of thick leather
in the whistling sounds of the trees
in the far off sound of a chainsaw or someone chopping wood
in the smooth curve of a felt hat, in unbridled ponies
The Devil’s Language 3
near the sound of horses and wind
where you sat on her knee in a canvas tent
and she fed you bannock and tea
and syllables
that echo in your mind now, now
that you can’t make the sound
of that voice that rocks you and sings you to sleep
in the devil’s language.
The Pemmican Eaters
…..
gone, uncle they're gone
and something in us goes too following after
les animaux, those who you "called" as if they were your brother
les animaux, those who you called mon frère and herded with their great beards
les animaux, the brothers that have left us they have moved to another plain,
uncle, on the last unt instead of seeing a moving sea of brown backs, a rippling
ground
now, you see only a few stumps feeding on grasses
now, their great size is swallowed by the bigger prairie
prairie, that once seemed like it couldn't hold all
les animaux, their sound like distant thunder will never reach your ears again
…..