#NoTrespass
       

metawew
notinikew
masinahikew
pimâtasiw

What makes sense in new moons
in frontline camps
on the eve of tactical police clear-outs?
Black & blue uniforms
sneaking between pine
cedar and snowdrift,
reflect centuries trading furs,
red coats and rivers,
cutlasses, muskets, cannons
or hydro dams & golf courses
with paramilitary green
and translucent riot shields.
Wield injunction like billy club,
assault rifles like toy cap pistols.

Swinging arm animated
dominant like Dominion
or the past of a young Surrey boy
barely eight-years-old,
brought to life by the ripping
of brother to foster care,
car 66, mental health unit
constables responding
to psychotic episode
with stretcher and bindings.

Does dependence & naivete
look like the neighbour tapping
three dial-tone buttons,
forcing me to stare down
the badge & barrel
in the hallway outside apartment?

Switch back to today:
land defenders don't depend
on written word or stamp-seal
or emergency call
to prove themselves steward—
they occupy the land.

I want to show integrity
in my tensing neck muscle
spitting at constable's sunglasses.

But in Wet'suwet'en
spit is not the stand that stops
the clearing of camp
by kôhkôsisak
in unceded snowdrifts—

the integrity is in tobacco
dropped to cedar
whispered names
and each elder
protecting the line
like thickened bark
from thousand-year old-growth.

This red road is long
but the bones hold up
like the bones of ancestors
who knew—who know
we stand together
or not at all.

I hear dust
and dirt
and ash
and pine,
and the secrets beneath
sacred ground
in fungal tubes in soil
and the first people
blocking the road,
raising children
and babes in the bush.
The smell of melted rubber
smouldered smudge and pine
wafts through the air,
stillness, silence
and lessons.

Listen.

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Copyright © 2021 Tawahum Bige All rights reserved
from Prairie Fire
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission