A Creative Way Out of Work
A creative workplace for Valerie Poulin.

Walking the Same Ground

May 9th 2010 in Poetry

You climbed through a hole in the Earth’s
surface, through height, cold, beauty,
through depth, heat, emptiness. I climbed

to greet the sister who fell from the sky,
just as a son rose to meet me.
Gods gave us the power of dreams.

In fabricated photographs, we press our selves
into ceremony as crown dancers bless the way
before us. We watch tobacco smoke take prayers

to our creator. I stitch sacraments together, mourn
black markings on sleeping birch trees. Ancestral
wisdom passes through four lives. I pause

on the fourth agreement with land, consider this
code unbroken. With hands hungry for light, I cast
a new body in mud. Bones vanish in imagination

and I learn to dance backward, to hear the gentle beat
of footsteps, to bring forward spirit ancestors, to walk
the same ground.

From "Theory of Illumination" a chapbook of poetry by Valerie Poulin.

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