Goodbyes

When we buried you, the ground was still just soft enough to break with the shovel, the tip cutting through an inch-hard layer of frost on the surface, winter’s first kiss. The child’s tears flowed as we put your small body, stilled now, wrapped in flannel, on a bed of hay at the bottom of the narrow hole I had chiseled carefully alongside a newly-planted fir tree. Goodbye, sweet guinea, I said, but the child’s body was wracked with grief as she choked on the words, so we left you silently then in stilled dreams.

Tantalizing haiku

Glory of the night!
New moon hides in winter’s shroud
Frigid, lacy scales

How can I resist the temptation of 3 little lines, a mere 17 syllables? We're all on the mend; the flu is nothing against my precious stockpile of medicinal herbs and potions. Bit by bit, I'm finding my way back to the computer. I hope to visit my blogging friends again shortly.

Healing haiku

When cough, fever, chills
wrack your body, wrap it warm
elder flower tea

(The kids and I are all home sick with the flu this week. What a great opportunity to dig through my herbal medicine chest, stoke up the woodstove, and cuddle up warm.)

Forgotten angels

The truth swings round. The memory
too old for this, too old for this now

a bridge, broken loose swinging, a slow arc
through river’s mischievous current
swim, swim, flutter kick home

swings round. The arc a small child running,
a curve, giggles full of glee, arms held wide
to snatch and spin, laughing round,
spinning to the ground. The memory held
lost now, lost now, too late to swim home

precious as a momentary lapse of moth,
brush of wings, silver powder the gift,
scattered carelessly, of long forgotten angels.

Rachel Westfall
November 11, 2009

Your bed is full of dragons

Your bed is full of dragons, their tails
wrapped surreptitiously through clefts and hollows, soft
and abandoned with the breath of your sleep still clinging
like dew to a cottony nest. Your bed

is strewn with nightingales, each one
holding a grand story treasured in her breast, sung clear
as mountain air to the delight
of dreams, the sweep of meadows. The breath

of dragons, the clinging of nightingales sticks fast
to the cuffs of your flannel pyjamas, abandoned
in a crumpled lonesome pile as you dashed forgetful,
forgotten, singing your donkey song into a bright new day.
　
Rachel Westfall
November 5, 2009

shallow roots

Something has gone terribly wrong in the native culture education programming in our elementary schools. My daughter told me last night that she can't be native, because she doesn't eat moose. We talked about it again in the morning, and she said a man came into her grade 1 class last year and taught them how to make gopher and beaver traps. As an animal lover and a vegetarian, she was offended by the idea of killing these animals, so she rejected the whole notion of native culture and tradition, and disowned that part of her own ancestry.

As we talked this morning, my daughter got more and more upset to hear that things like picking wild berries, making wildcrafted herbal medicines, and knowing the sacred plants are also native traditions, ones which we practice in our family, yet these things are overlooked completely in the 'native culture' teachings at school. Though our conversation is a start, I've got the feeling that something has been broken, and I'm not sure how to fix it.

shallow roots

last child in the woods
never wondering how you got here
heart dreaming green and crowberry
soaring song and the owl’s cry
clanless in school halls
as they talk the culture
you say isn’t yours because
you’d never do it that way
the way those experts say
their hands weaving near-forgotten traps
and kneading borrowed recipes of dough

last child in the woods
spirit of my heart
you are the forest’s daughter
berries roots and medicines of green
brow furrowing at what they say
no matter what they say
you create the way

Rachel Westfall
November 1, 2009

Curandera

I would take your pain,
hold it like an egg until
it warms in my hands,
turning it over
every few hours
until it hatches. A soft
yellow chick would tap
through, and with my thumbs
I’d gently widen the rent
in the shell to set
this new life free. Free,
I would hear you sigh,
nerves finally eased
with the release of this long,
low sweet gestation.

Rachel Westfall
October 27, 2009

For Christopher

Award time!

Thanks, Joseph, for gifting me with a Creative Blogger Award. (If you haven’t checked out Joseph’s blog yet, please do! It’s well worth the visit.)

The Creative Blogger award comes with two requirements: I’m supposed to pass it on to 7 people, but first, and I’m supposed to tell you all seven interesting (bizarre?) bits of trivia about myself.

Alright. Here are the seven oddball tidbits about me:

1) All my life I have dreamed longingly about times before motor vehicles, as something in me rebels against a car-oriented landscape. My young daughter recently said the same thing to me, so maybe it’s genetic.

2) I have ancestors from North America, Europe, and Asia. Maybe in the next generation, a few other continents will get added to the mix. My kids and I have enough variety in us that we qualified to become members of the Yukon Metis Nation. Having no clear ancestry, I’ve felt unrooted all this time.

3) I was fascinated by animal behaviour as a kid and I always thought I’d study it one day. In the end, I majored in botany because I couldn’t justify animal dissection in university.

4) Both my kids were planned homebirths. The first, my son, was a last-minute hospital transfer due to a nervous midwife; the second, my daughter, was a freebirth (no midwife). My daughter was born in a fishie pool. It was wonderful.

5) I love my woodstove and my house full of pets, plants and kids.

6) I don’t own a television, and I probably never will.

7) My dad used to bake cookies using the applesauce he made from the Dolgo crabapple tree he’d planted in the backyard of my childhood home. I can still remember exactly how they tasted. I planted two Dolgos in my yard last year, so maybe I’ll get to taste those cookies again some day soon.

As for picking seven of you to pass this on to, yikes!! Believe me, if I’m following your work, I consider you to be an award-worthy creative blogger. So, I’m going to use this opportunity to spotlight seven of the bloggers who have recently come to my attention.

Check these out for yourself. You won’t regret it.

Word Garden by Shay
In Through the Back Door by Erin
Dancing with the Waves of the Sea by SarahA
Kigo of the Kat, Kat's latest creation
Epiphany by Cynthia
The photographs by Morgaine
Misty afternoon photography by Ida

remembering

Maybe there’s a place
between the words you said
and I, mind downstream
laughing on an inner tube
slightly high and giddy
decades past, drawn back sharply
by your irritation, crust-like lichen
a memory, 50 years
to grow a hand’s breadth
across granite punched through
by the mineral seeker’s drill,
maybe there’s a place
in there I left something,
back then for myself
to find today, rediscover
and come back full circle and spit,
those words no gift but a curse,
slow venom held cradled
like a charm
　
Rachel Westfall
October 23, 2009

what we won

The sky tossed jewels that day, a carpet
crunching under our booted feet
and lining the trails with brilliance.

That night, surely the moon painted us a curve
of shimmer through the forest, so the thought
of getting lost never crossed our minds.

Instead we shuffled our feet, stomped
and blew frosty breath into chilled hands, reluctant
to head home just yet and kill the moment.

Rachel Westfall
October 21, 2009