Runaway Dreams Read Online Free Page A

closed the wash
    of it like surf against your ribs and the air
    crisp as icicles on your tongue
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    there’s gentleness in this slow sure creep into being
    and something in you reacts to that
    needs it, wants it, dreamt it sometime
    so that the sun’s ebullient cascade
    down the pine-pocked flank of mountain
    becomes the first squawk and natter of ravens
    in the high branches of fir where the wind
    soughs like the exhalation of a great bear
    raising her snout in salute and celebration
    to this Great Mystery presenting itself again
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    Nindinaway-majahnee-dog is what the Anishinabeg say
    and when that language was reborn in you
    that phrase more than anything adhered to your insides
    all my relations
    this is what you see from here
    this connectedness to things, this critical joining that becomes
    a revelation, a prayer and an honour song all at the same time
    a blessing, really, that someone cared enough
    to come and find you in your wandering
    and bring you home to it, to ritual, to history
    to language and the teachings you’ve learned to see
    and hear and taste and feel and intuit in everything
    this ceremony of becoming
    that morning brings you to again
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    you become Ojibway
    like the way you become a Human Being
    measure by measure, step by step
    on a trail blazed by the hand of grace
    every awakening a reclaiming of the light
    you were born to

The Canada Poem
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    I
    Listen. Can you not hear the voices of the Old Ones talking,
    speaking to you in the language you’ve forgotten? In your
    quietest moments can you not feel the weight of an old and
    wrinkled hand upon your shoulder or your brow? Listen.
    Close your eyes and listen and tell me if you cannot hear the
    exhalation of a collected breath from your ancestors in the
    spirit world standing here beside you even now. Listen.
    They are talking. They speak to you in Dene, Cree, Micmac,
    Blackfoot, Ojibway and Inuktitut but they also speak
    Hungarian, German, Gaelic, Portuguese, French, Mandarin
    and English. The voices of the Old Ones. The ones who
    made this country speak to us now because there is no colour
    in the spirit world, no skin. Just as there is no time, there is
    no history. There’s only spirit, only energy flowing outward,
    onward in a great eternal circle that includes every soul that’s
    ever stood upon this land, embraced this Earth, been borne
    forward on this Creation and then fallen head over heels in
    love with the spell of this country. Listen. They are speaking
    to all of us now, telling us that we’re all in this together — and
    we always were. Listen. Only listen and you will hear them.
    They speak in the hard bite of an Atlantic wind across Belle
    Isle, in the rush of Nahanni waters, in the pastoral quiet over
    Wynyard, in the waft of thermals climbing over Revelstoke
    and Field to coast down and settle over Okotoks, then again
    in the salt spray of Haida Gwaii, the screech of an eagle over
    the wide blue eye of the lake called Great Bear and in the
    crackle, swish and snap of Northern Lights you can hear in
    the frigid air above Pangnirtung. They speak to us there.
    Listen. Listen. There are spirit voices talking, weaving threads
    of disparate stories into one great aural tapestry of talk that
    will outlast us all — the story of a place called Kanata that has
    come to mean “our home.”
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    II
    sitting with Earl in the cab of his truck
    the ’65 Mercury all banged to hell
    from running woodlot roads and hauling
    boats and motors through bogs and swamps
    to landings the Ojibway said were there
    and where the jack and pickerel lurked
    in the depths beyond the bass at the reeds
    â€œmore’n yuh could shake a stick at,” he said
    and laughed and rubbed a calloused palm
    along the windshield and talked about how
    â€œthis old girl, she done seen her day but she
    still got go in her by god” and laughs again
    and talks about his