“Unreconciled”

Leanna Pankratz

A writer, student of psychology, journalist, recovery advocate, model, style enthusiast, film geek, and empowered Indigenous woman based in North Vancouver, BC, Canada. This poem encompasses the often baffling dichotomy between so many of our urban, colonial surroundings, and the freedom, strength, and longing to be one with our Earth that is woven into our DNA. 

Unreconciled

I always knew I belonged to the wind

to the river, the grasslands and the sky,

to the  passionate dance of a flame

 

Those great scorching plains once the canvas for the lives of my ancestors

with their crow-black hair long as prairie grass

hands deep in dust

spirits unbridled by expectation

 

I ended up elsewhere – stripped of language, song, and smoke

No one’s fault but the system.

“genetic trauma’s a bitch,” I mutter to girlfriends

bitter irony

in manicured apartments

over boujee perrier and vegan cheese

 

And when I’m alone, I’m alone in offices, apartments, and my mind

with nothing to distract but a Netflix subscription

A puff of balcony smoke, the tracking number of a sartorial delivery:

consumerist diversion.

 

Bound in concrete mountains, surrounded by raw energies

maximized by greed and despair, sometimes hope and blossoming love

whatever mood the bright swollen moon is in

See the city laid before me in hazy filters

like a film set.

Straight out of some New Wave flick

 

The brown weathered faces of my brothers in rags on the street corners

“what happened to us? where did the warrior go?”

I saw my eyes reflected back in theirs like a mirror.

That old croaky voice, crooning the songs of my people.

 

The stars told me to seek,

so I sought and swept the inner sanctions of my mind

unreconciled memories

anxiety.

trauma, though we’re told not to speak of it.

 

I came from the stars just as you

And I bring with me their elation and their sorrow

old as millennia. astral organisms.

Back when Creator whispered me into being.

 

Maybe this is why I feel detached

Why so many of us fall

For the land is our medicine, and we to it

Oh Creator,

Bring me back to the

river and waves

grasslands and song

the passionate dance of a flame.

-  Eagle River

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