Runaway Dreams Read Online Free PDF

breath
    you never want to exhale
    these radiant shining moments
    that have come to be the foundation
    of your time here
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    when you think of this country now
    it becomes as perfect as this vista
    this lake and these mountains stunning
    in the magnitude of the force of them
    resting together on the power of detail
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    like when you watch your wife cutting
    glass for the art she forms with a kiln
    seeing how the minute bits of silica
    fused together become something more
    by virtue of the vision she has
    of their wholeness
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    her story began on a convict ship bound
    for the shores of Western Australia
    and continued in the buying and the selling
    of her great-grandmother on a Fremantle dock
    a West Indian black whose face you see
    in the line of her face when the light
    catches it just so or the direct way
    she has of looking at you telling you
    with the strength of that level gaze
    that the chains that bind her to the past
    are forged from love and the knowledge
    that her story, her life, is not just what
    you see but the sum of its parts
    like a lake shining at the foot of a mountain
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    your story began in a residential school
    in northwestern Ontario where your family
    was hung upon a cross of doctrine
    that said to save the child they must
    kill the Indian first — and did almost
    except that you were born
    in a canvas army tent in a trap-line camp
    set beside the crooked water of the Winnipeg River
    tucked in a cradleboard on a bed of spruce and cedar
    hearing the Old Talk cooed and whispered
    by the grandmother who could not save
    you in the end from being
    scooped away and taken to a white world
    where the Indian was scraped away
    and the rawness and the woundings
    at your belly seeped and bled
    their poisons into you for years
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    both of you adopted
    removed
    from the shelter of arms
    that held you first
    the story of you edited
    by crude punctuation
    and the journeys that you took from there
    led you to extraordinary places of dark
    and light and all shades in between
    the acts of discovery and reclamation
    adding to the image you hold now
    both of you willing to tell it to each other
    so that you know that what makes you stronger
    is the coming together of those stories
    the union of your lives the harmony that happens
    when the weave of things is allowed to blend
    all on its own accord
    a confluence of energy and spirit
    that the Old Ones say occurs without any help from us
    the detail of things defined by Creator’s purpose
    and fused together into wholeness
    like a lake shining at the foot of a mountain
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    so you look across this stretch of Canada
    and it’s as if you can feel the whole of it
    shimmer beneath your feet like the locomotive
    thunder of a hundred thousand hooves of buffalo
    charging into history
    or the skin of a great drum beating
    carried in the feet of young men dancing
    grasses flat for the gathering of people
    come to celebrate the sun
    and the wind that blows across the water
    becomes the same wind that blew across
    the gritty, dusty faces of settler folk freed
    from the yoke of Europe the tribe of them
    following the creak of wagon wheels
    forward into a history shared
    by diverse peoples with wondrous stories
    told around fires
    that kept them sheltered from the night
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    so maybe this is what it comes to mean
    this word, this name, this Kanata
    the Huron word for village that has
    come to mean “our home”
    maybe in the end it’s a word for one fire
    burning where a circle of people gathers
    to hear the stories that define them
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    VII
    Listen. They are with us. They are standing with us even now,
    at your shoulder while you gather nets, forge steel, harvest
    crops, lay roads, build houses, tend homes, raise children
    or stalk moose through a muskeg bog. Can you not feel the
    comforting presence of them watching over you? Can you
    not feel the weight of an old and wrinkled hand upon your
    shoulder or your brow? They are