CROW

BY: LORNA CROZIER

DELIVERED AT THE 2005 SASKATCHEWAN BOOK AWARDS GALA

The crow knows the children of the day, the light-fingered

wind that steals the scent of roses, their simple bliss

of fluttertongue and disarray. In its beak the crow carries light

that fell from the sun, light’s broken body, its divergences.

The crow carries songs to kill a wihtikow; it carries a prairie dog’s

small gifts, firewater, the bruised rind of a lilac moon.

Its eye is fixed on you, on a long man’s shadow,

the black brim of a Quaker’s hat, time’s body.

Encyclopedic, the crow’s caws take you

out of yourself. When you hear it

in early morning, you know this is not Eden

outside your window; you are not building your future

in a garden of art. Instead, at your door runs a highway

where the crow makes tapas out of roadkill, out of the sour

cherries of flattened gut and blood.  Here, trucks of commerce

travel tunnels of tyranny, the maps make no difference,

the twentieth century unravels a new history

the trees and rivers and muskeg lakes do not want to hear.

What the crow knows you know too. Together

you could build a monument to sorrow,

its bitter embrace, its joining. You could write

a legend in a new language of the plains,

call the crow a prairie phoenix growing its heart

from the dry flames red lilies flash along the roadside.

Tonight the crow flies over the stone house

in the middle of town, through the cleft in the Cuthand Hills,

through the eyes of the Cree and beyond. It flies

through a hundred years. When you see it lift above

the limits of your life, know you are seeing

the darkness beneath all things. This, finally, is crow:

your shadow-brother, death-alchemist and father,

your beautiful blood daughter and your charred letter home.