I'm going to read one by D'Arcy McNickle.
And this one I want to read because it's
an example of the liminality of language
and how language can return us to a sense of homeland
as a place of being in between.
As we all know, Indigenous homelands in this country
have endured a violent mapping and languaging.
And poetics I believe can become a way of remapping.
Many of the poems in this anthology
critique the imperial notion of the land
as something to be possessed for the purpose of actualizing
individualistic power.
This national striving to possess and delimit
is comparable to the way we strive
through language to define.
Poetry turns against this impulse,
spiraling, drawing, and retracting
location and possession.
Poetry does not define or answer,
it exists in the open landscape of the question.
It looks both ways into the past and the future.
In D'Arcy McNickle's poem we can see the poem embracing
not knowing, being lost, and finding a homeland internally,
in the very journey of seeking.
D'Arcy McNickle was born in 1904 Métis and confederated Salish
and Kootenai tribes.
He was an author and a community organizer.
He was born and raised in St. Ignatius, Montana.
So this poem is called "Man Hesitates, But Life Urges."
There is this shifting endless film
and I have followed it down the valleys and over the hills,
pointing with a wavering finger when it disappeared
in purple forest patches with its ruffle and wave
to the slightest breathing wind god.
There is this film seen suddenly far off when the sun,
walking to his setting, turns back for a last look .
And out there on the far, far prairie,
a lonely drowsing cabin catches and holds
a glint for one how-endless moment.
In a staring window, the fire and song of the martyrs.
There is this film that has passed to my fingers
and I have trembled, afraid to touch.
And in the eyes of one who had wanted
to give what I had asked, but hesitated,
tried, and then came with a weary, aged, "Not quite."
I could but see that single realmless point of time.
All that is sad, and tired, and old, and endless,
shifting film.
And I went again down the valleys and over the hills,
pointing with wavering finger, ever reaching to touch,
trembling, ever fearful to touch.
I think this poem is a good example
of the retracing of land that can happen through language.
In this poem the narrator speaks from a state of displacement
and placement at once, he stays present in the middle space,
seeing but not quite seeing, on a way somewhere
but not arriving.
Healing I believe is not something we arrive at,
it is a space of transformation we must transit through.
The poem reminds me of that space.
It is a poem about the conditions
of that liminality, which is also this space of healing.