Sometimes I want to know who I am she said. <br />I am more than the Scottish clan that gave me its name to wear. <br />My blood was here long before the arrival of settlers from Ontario. <br />The Selkirk Colony and Fort Garry were the clothes of a stranger <br />That covered my mother’s blood. <br /> <br />I often wake from strange dreams of plains <br />Stretching a thousand miles from east to west, <br />Forests in the North <br />And mountains rising in the West. <br />I wake from dreams of bison and elk, <br />Of wolf, rabbit, fox, and river clams, <br />Of wild plants - gooseberries, cherries and tall prairie grass. <br /> <br />I sometimes hear the names of ghosts who walk beside me – <br />Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Sioux, Plains Cree, <br />Assiniboine, Ojibway, Blackfoot, Blood, Peigan and Sarcee. <br />I hold bone, shell and antler fashioned into awls and scrapers, <br />And the point of an arrow made of stone. <br /> <br />Sometimes I think I know who I am she said, <br />And then I wake and the plains and the trees <br />And the mountains are gone. <br />The herds and solitary animals have left, <br />The bones and shells and antlers disappeared, <br />The plants crushed in the ice and mud of many lost millennium. <br />All gone, but the blood of my mother flowing through my chest. <br />And then I remember a small chipped stone <br />With its cutting edge close to my heart.<br /><br />Eric Peters<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/arrowhead-2/
