Hope Matters
(https://www.halifaxpubliclibraries.ca/blogs/post/indigenous-life-in-poetry-and-prose/)
By Coast Salish, opens a new window and Tsleil-Waututh, opens a new window poet, Columpa Bobb, opens a new window
Hope lives inside the artist:
instrument, brush, voice, pen, sculpture, body.
Hope breathes life inside those shadowy crevices
where doubt waits to feast on our weakened and dimmed dinner light.
Hope gives us strength to trudge through the muck
and the mire to find solid ground.
Hope is the home of curiosity, imagination, intelligence, and compassion.
Artists are an empathic link between hope and the outside world.
Hope frees, hope relieves, hope moves us.
Artists move people from inspiration to action
and direct hope toward a new reality
that can be shared by everyone.
In the end.
"Hope Matters" from Hope Matters © 2019 by Lee Maracle, Columpa Bobb, and Tania Carter.
By Anishinaabe (Ojibway), poet, Richard Wagamese,
Ceremony doesn’t change you
The old woman said
You change you
Ceremony
Is just the trail
You learn to follow
Until you reach the place
Where that can happen
I became an Indian after that
At the Wellhead
By Seamus Heaney
Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed
As you always do, are like a local road
We’ve known every turn of in the past —
That midge-veiled, high-hedged side-road where you stood
Looking and listening until a car
Would come and go and leave you lonelier
Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,
Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran,
Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,
Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbour
Who played the piano all day in her bedroom.
Her notes came out to us like hoisted water
Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead
Where next thing we’d be listening, hushed and awkward.
That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician
Was like a silver vein in heavy clay.
Night water glittering in the light of day.
But also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan.
She touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille
In books like books wallpaper patterns come in.
Her hands were active and her eyes were full
Of open darkness and a watery shine.
She knew us by our voices. She’d say she ‘saw’
Whoever or whatever. Being with her
Was intimate and helpful, like a cure
You didn’t notice happening. When I read
A poem with Keenan’s well in it, she said,
‘I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.’
Seamus HEANEY, b. 1939 Co. Derry
https://voetica.com/poem/6790
The Given Note
Seamus Heaney
On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.
Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather
Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy
For he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.
So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.
Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.