a brief survey of remarkably nutritious weeds.

Weeds I Often Find Growing Right Where the Houses are Taking Over.

(English – Cree – Latin)

Dandelions – Osawa-pukwanes – Taraxacum officinales

Roots were gathered and dried in the autumn, and fresh boiled leaves were used to purify the blood and lower blood sugar. The liquid was also used to treat anaemia, jaundice, anxiety & eczema. All parts are edible and rich in Vitamins A,C,E, B-complex, iron, calcium and potassium. It’s useful in treating liver, digestive and urinary ailments, stimulating the immune system, aiding in weight loss and generally being used in salads, soups, breads, and cold drinks. I have been told my maternal grandfather made excellent dandelion wine.

Nettles – Masanak – Urtica gracilis

The young plants were added to soups or eaten like spinach, and the leaves were used to treat kidney stones, diarrhea, irregular menstruation and intestinal parasites.
Coagulants present in infusions may have helped treat internal hemorrhages and nosebleeds.
New research is showing that nettles are useful in treating prostrate cancer, hepatitis, and gall-bladder ailments; they can improve short-term memory in people with Alzheimers as well as fight gingivitis. Actually stinging the skin with the prickles, thereby using it as a counter-irritant to stimulate the body to produce more anti-inflammatory agents, has been useful in helping people with multiple sclerosis, rheumatism, localized paralysis and arthritis.

Yarrow – Wapanew-uskwa – Archille millefolium

Salves were made with powdered yarrow and fat to put on wounds, as yarrow contains coagulants and has anti-bacterial properties. It was also used to make a sort of hair rinse. It has also been used as a sedative, anaesthetic, anti-spasmodic and anti-inflammatory drug, and may be useful in treating diabetes-related conditions. It should never be used in high doses. Many of my nosebleeds as a child were treating by my father shoving some of this up my nose.

Pennycress – [can’t find Cree name!] introduced from Europe – Thlaspi arvense

This plant is high in Vitamin C and sulphur, and has a strong, mustardy taste, and can be slightly irritating even used sparingly. (Can poison in high concentrations) Historically, it was used in the Mithridate antidote to poison, and employed throughout Eurasia to treat rheumatism, lumbago, and eye inflammation.

Shepherd’s purse – [can’t find Cree name!] introduced from Europe – Capsella bursa-pastoris

All parts of the plant are edible (pods, seeds, sprouts, and taste like a combination of turnip and cabbage. My dad says they’re spinach-y... It has been used by many North American peoples as a seasoning in soups and stews, as well as ground into flour for bread and porridge. It is rich in Vitamin C and has been used as a remedy for speeding healing, stopping internal bleeding, easing earaches and stomach cramps. It was used in childbirth to cause uterine contractions (it contains a chemical similar to oxytocin. New research shows that the plants may help prevent cancer.

* All information from Dr. Anne Anderson’s interviews with Cree elder Luke Chalifoux, other random bits from my dad, and Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Rockies by Linda Kershaw (Lone Pine Press, 2000)

nettles & pennycress

weeds

beside the shiny white fence
the tough fleshy roots
of nettles & pennycress
grow & grow

fed by the carcasses of
trees their grip is
insistent as a foetus
clinging to her mother

beneath the silver
willow tatters, red crab-apples,
disembodied wreckage of a wing –

for the mansions have come!
monstrous garages gouge
at the earth perforating a womb
as people pave gardens

but yet & yet the wild yarrows
still reincarnate, heart-shaped
shepherd’s purses are flapping in the wind –

amongst these hardened yards i know
my baba will float around, coaxing;
watering with a tin can, pressing at the soil
with her earthy fingernails

(she taught us to plant things,
her hands were always so
covered in loam & love)

& i know she’ll pity
those rich mansion-people
& their big houses full of cars
& impoverished little children
who live in the disconnected basement
stunted by ceilings & video games

because she knows
that weeds will soon
start pushing up through
that faulty foundation

weeds
will always survive
like houses don’t –

"proverbs! they are like the drugs to me!"

Rummaging around in my computer-files I unearthed a number of things I wrote in the summer-time, when I was in Calgary. I had very very little time to write anything while I was there but somehow assorted fragments of poems did find their way into my notebook & then I must have typed them when I arrived home in August (though I don't remember doing this!)

Most of my journal-writing while I was there was anthropological observations on international children & their behavior (& adventures with syntax!) & dwelling in the city of calgary. However, other little bits arose (because I really needed to get my mind off the other 16 hours of the day!) & I present them here. They are quite disconnected. Little bones in a pile. I don't think much can be constructed of them. But they make for some interesting archaeology.

* * *

this morning is
wrestling with sad eyes
& phone cards.
can’t get through to azerbaijan

but that's okay, because
bahar & arzu tell me over & over again
in their sweetly hoarse semaphore

“baku – azerbaijan – caspian sea
– beautiful – atlantic ocean – we are in canada
– will you help us?
yes, yes"

we are drawing pictures
& maps
on the foggy rainstained bus window.
“green grass!”

her voice of jet lag,
soft green rain & sleepiness.
cacaphony of interlingual voices
falling into my head.

at lloyd’s rollerrink
we stumble around holding hands,
braving the 80’s time warp
"hey meeekey you're so fayna"

as tall ostrich-like men in sweats
from that bygone era skate circles around us.
bahar stares at them: "not like azerbaijan!"

"yes, yes!"

* * *

(this one is bilingual. i remember getting so tired of analysing & explaining English that it came out in ukrainian first. it's not very good & the translation is lacking. & i think in ukrainian i sound like björk does in english at her least inscrutable)

there lives within trees
the warming thought of fire,
embryos waiting to burst aflame

as leaves send early
the ghosts to incubate on branches,
words held up on an iridescent skeleton;

now come the waxy unfoldings in the rain,
with vowels spreading luminous & fiery,
offerings on paper tongues,

fragments floating to the sun –

вже живе в щирині дерева
тепла думка вогню,
зародок чекає запалитися

та й рано листи пошлюють дух
щоб висиджувати на галузах слив
яких ростуть на райдужних кістках

та й тепер у дощі прийде
розгортання воскове
та й голосні звуки
поширяють по’лумяно і світно
як на папірних язиках підношення,

як носяться уривки до сонця...

* * *

[hwy 2]

i am in the backseat
& restless as a

row of windbreak trees
arching their black spines,
rolling up against a swelling sky –

the river’s flooding her banks,
washing across a widening prairie night,
rain hiding the city lights
in the spiral arms of their systems,
galaxies reaching out to hold
trees & farmhouses

in long glowing tendrils,
aching anchor in the void.

* * *

[14th floor sunset, over nose hill]

moving over the landscape
we go as clouds
on the face of the sunset,

embossed & ever rolling
over the earth –

deep green grassy dream, soft sky
feathered down
like a drumming partridge wing –

waves explode, deadly violet
disappearing
into the warm annihilation of sleep

* * *

sunset sky like smashed nectarines
beer & the hum of the pop-a machine-a lulls me
i am a noun declining in my sleep

* * *

[walking home from kinko’s, 11:30 pm]

downtown moon reflects
silence like a watery lamp in the
dryness of the heart;

my tongue well-honed now
by the sediment’s swift flow
smooth grains slipping through

the throat’s reservoir
where i catch this sadness, cache
it in the full pool of my speech –

* * *
the only poem that is entire.

[horseshoe canyon]

wandering down into the
bright erosion of the earth’s skull
reveals the ochred slate of the heart --
cactus blooming gold & harsh
as sunlight,
spikes like lightning-struck rock --

& lichen grows in the folds
of a sandy cerebrum,
the thoughts of water
running through rocky synapses,
paths so pliant
& shaped by the wind,
the flight of
the slippery waxwing,
a swallowtail hawk

dives in the soft sage,
through sand moving slow
as time’s insistent hands,
through
epiphanies of wildflowers –

those red poppytongues
speaking nascent & blooming
with so much life,
for here is
the essence,
the origin, the barest dream of earth --

* * *

[kananaskis to jasper]

i didn’t think summer
would haunt me

but ashes
fly like reverse meteors,
into a sky dizzy with stars

& elk move as soft ghosts
around those mooncoloured bones
we disturbed

& i will remember
your voices

* * *

[athabasca glacier]

the ice carves soft pictographs
with its harsh smooth palms,
the language of rock
lapping with glacial tongues,
the endless watermarks
a notebook i wish i could
understand

* * *
(please forgive me, william carlos williams)

forgive me
for i have nearly been kissed
by that young spaniard

who calls me 'leeetle preeencess!'
& is waiting at the airport
for me to say goodbye

i didn't see it coming
for he spoke so innocently
with that lisping accent
so sweet & so cold

* * *

hammers & sickles.

[memorial to victims of the 1932-33 holodumor in ukraine, edmonton city hall]

This is a poem I wrote November 26th while at work. I'd stopped by City Hall at lunchtime for the memorial for victims of the Ukrainian Holodumor (lit. 'hunger-death'). But I forgot I'd even written it, even though I was very angry at the time... because this was also the day my baba died & I lost the papers somewhere in a folder. Yesterday I unearthed it & finished it.

* * *

hammers & sickles

downtown saturday
there was a memorial
for the holodumor –

i happened to see
you
watching us while waiting nearby
for a bus
you, everyone’s favourite socialist!

but as i sang shche ne vmerla ukraïna
i wanted to tell you
kick you,
shake you!
when i noticed the gleaming buttons
on your bag:

that soviet insignia shining yellow
as some badge of your leftist intentions
& i would like to believe
that you mean well,

but it shocks me
that you
so enlightened
are yet so ignorant of this symbol,

for the hammer & the sickle
were just as sharp-edged
as the nazi’s twisted swastika

because these were the tools
that stalin used
to pound people down,
beat out the gilt from siberian stars

these are the tools
that slipped the rope
around
the neck of a poet,
a priest,
a shaman, &

these are the tools
that scythed my family’s wheat!

used the very tools of their survival
to mercilessly made a breadbasket
into
a death-camp

turned them into bony ghosts
devouring their own, the living
& the dead
while sharp weapons guarded

overfilled silos
beside them –

& you think
you’re a revolutionary
of social rebellion!
or maybe you just think
you’re totally in fashion –

but i don’t believe in hipster irony

because there is no way
to make
hip satire of violent oppression
of these families, my ancestors’ deaths!

here we are still remembering
what the books gloss over –

& it is not yet time to reclaim those weapons!

& i just can’t believe that

someone

who would be the first to fight
against fascism & swastikas,

will still,
as a socialist
go around wearing this?

***

here:

http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/

& this next article upsets me -- why can't people realize they are of the same hurtful symbolism! maybe someday communists could reclaim them as the tools of workers. but right now, they are still stalin's. & millions of people can't ignore that the hammer and sickle do represent something that is just as dire and cruel as xenophobia and anti-Semitism.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4234335.stm

indulging in delicious sounds.

[one of the murals on the exterior of the old youth drop-in centre on 101st/103rd(?)]

The other night Bryna asked me what my favourite music of this past calendar year has been, & I must have named at least five albums instantly. Later that night my sleeplessness coaxed me into making a list:

Takk – Sigur Ros
To be wrapped up in this collection of warm, moving layers, riding the bus with tea in one’s hands & Sigur Ros in one’s ears will alleviate sadness & most types of mental shakiness. Little illuminated clouds on September Sunday mornings, trees in amber swirling, raining down leaves to catch in tiny curb-whirlwinds is the cure for most bad things.

Fragmenti – Paris to Kyiv
Open spaces to fill, bells to hide things in. Here are echoes & textures & repetitions & variations, birds with familiar feathers & voices to remind one not to forget things. It feels very old & wise. Alexis Kochan has a very beautiful voice, a little higher than my mother’s, the way I expect my grandma must have sounded when she was younger & still had a full range. This also conjures a place, wide reverberating spaces that I want to make films of – films of wind, of grass growing, of clouds moving, birds in flocks scattering into the sunlight.

(Come on Feel the) Illinoise – Sufjan Stevens
Lovely & choral with banjos & oboes, & the sort of comforting, truthful voice I want whispering in my ear. Rather wrenching & grand songs about place & identity & personal-historical memory all mingled together. (Landscape + Identity = Love!) It made me think about the physical places that my writing is rooted in; I know much is attached to the Kananaskis area, but it made me realize just how much of my images come to me closer to home. From my forest, especially...

What else? Usually I do not like things that twang but Sarah Harmer (I’m a Mountain) can make slightly-twangy things lovely & joyful, things that I like to listen to over & over again. Chris & I (& Bailey the bunny) listened to this album at least six times in a row one day while we cooked...

Iron & Wine’s Woman King EP was a collection of folk-ish stories about various spiritual women that was poetic & provocative & also instrumentally delicious. Iron & Wine also made In the Reins with Calexico & this is also pleasant (& mariachi-fied!) Sam Beam’s lyrics fascinate me. They seem fragmentary at times, but the images & rhythms are so brilliant: “Black horse fly, lemonade / jar on the red ant hill / garden worm, cigarette / ash on the window sill”...

Ani Di Franco made Knuckle Down, which was also very good listening as usual; the song ‘Recoil’ is very much the second part of the song 'Welcome to:' & has brought me much comfort.

Beck’s Guero is good to listen to on the bus, & he has these lines that stand out in all the pleasant evocative nonsense, like ‘Hammer my bones on the anvil of daylight’. I like to listen to him on the autobus & it is good & distracting. Gogol Bordello made Gypsy Punks, and somehow they mixed Romany & Romanian & Yiddish & Russian & Carpatho-Ukrainian music with reggae-ish punk music & made something like good borshch that is political & charismatic & delightful & absurd. This summer M.I.A. (with Arular) gave me something to drown out the obnoxious pop music of my international pupils & I was grateful for that. It also helped me get up in the morning when I really didn’t want to.

There were also a lot of other musics I enjoyed this year, but they did not come out in 2005. I will have to make another list... Regina Spektor! Angelite
& Huun-Huur-Tu! Jorane’s live CD from a few years ago... Hmm. There were also a few CDs that appeared which sort of disappointed me... I was all excited for Four Tet (Everything Ecstatic) but I couldn’t really get into it. I don’t know -- it was interesting, much more complex, but it seemed to have lost a little bit of melody & warmth & replaced it with something that reminded me of... math... there was nothing there like ‘Everything is Alright’ or ‘Parks’. I think this is because of the loss of some of the organic instrumentation, or because the organic chunks were chopped up very finely & added to a repetitive stew... & while I admire the sound capabilities of computers, synthetic tones can often lack certain timbres, & I think it is the timbre we respond to most emotionally... The Decemberists’ Picaresque had a few songs I enjoyed quite much, like ‘16 Military Wives’ (which also has a delightful video!) but the whole CD lost its lustre a little too quickly. & Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine was extraordinarily ordinary. Alas...

Currently I am eagerly awaiting the new Cat Power (The Greatest) on January 24th. I will run away from work on my break to go to Listen Records to fetch it! How delightful (& potentially detrimental to one’s paycheque) it is to be so close to so many music-shops...

ps: If anyone is reading this, I would like to hear your music-list for this past year...

a bohemian waxwing.

Look who visited me on Ukrainian Christmas morning! I didn't have any miraculous visitations from swallows home early from the south (as in the famous Shchedryk carol), but amidst the snowflakes & clouds of ash-berries a fluffy little waxwing came... He wandered about the grass at the front, as if he was looking for something, and then sat in the tree for awhile, eating berries (but luckily not the point of inebriation). He was rather mellow & let me get quite close to take photos. He then flew away to the next-door tree, making his little kee-kee! sounds.

Bohemian waxwings are one of my favourite sorts of birds, so I shall take this as a good omen.

I saw cedar waxwings in Drumheller this summer, swooping over that very green pond in front of the Tyrrell museum. They were dark and sleek, and their colours were so bright that it seemed as if they'd just had a fresh coat of paint.

I used to think that bohemian waxwings came from Bohemia, but no... I believe they were named by rather conservative bird-watchers who thought their bright splashes of colour looked rather 'bohemian' in a Prague-or-Paris art-cafe mustache-wearing absinthe-drinking outlandish-dressing late 19th-century hippie sort of way. Sillys.

tykha nich, sviata nich...

[kutia]

she left us forty days ago,
she went to the pleiades.
a bird overhead scattering feathers,
snow amongst the lilies of the river still flowing –

(pid kryhoju spyt’ skryplyva pisnia...)*

& now long winter shadows fall
across the light that peals like bells, aching
like teeth rattling softly in a blue urn.

(na dykykh travakh spochyvajut’ zerny...)

these nights fold us in sudden,
the settling of a smoke-blue sky
as light turns over, a quilt flipped
& fluffed, colour of a swallow’s back.

(v synomu nebi ptashka litaje, vona nas okhoronjaje...)

i need to stop crying on photographs,
crying before the ikons, halos beaten gold
like flecks in her egg-blue eyes, but
she isn’t coming back to us with wooden dolls
& photographs of her country, far away...

(divchyno, pam’iatai tse!)

& i miss her. miss her like her wedding ring
misses its strong papery finger, polished
by sweat & flour & wool running across
her palms. & i know she’s here now

but why does she feels so far off,
dispersed like dust in the last of the sun, floating
like seeds & songs & kernels & birds
into the omniscience of wind?

(ale divchyno, pam’iatai!
v synomu nebi ptashka litaje, vona nas okhoronjaje
pid tykhamy krylamy...)

* * *
the italicized lines translate roughly t0:

= under the ice a creaking song is sleeping
= in the wild grasses the seeds are resting
= in the dark blue sky a bird is flying, she watches over us
= my dear, remember this!
= my dear remember, in the dark blue sky a bird is flying,
is protecting us beneath her quiet wings


~j.

foggy ghosts.

[ these photos taken by bryna & jenanne.]

One evening late last year, some ghosts were sighted in the fog near the edge of the earth. One was green & the other was the colour of caramel, & they blended into the forest & field so they were nothing more than suggestions of movement, a gesture of wind. Until it was dark they flickered there, frost bending the spines of old wheat, trampling lightly in the soft snow.

* * *

One of the ghosts thought of a poem she liked, because fog can be calming, & liminal:

a slumber did my spirit seal;
i had no human fears:
she seemed a thing that could not feel
the touch of earthly years.

no motion has she now, no force,
she neither hears nor sees;
rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
with rocks, and stones, and trees.

-- William Wordsworth

z novoho roku: poema.

rusalka.

a)

there is no time when
poems cannot exist.

even when the sky’s erased,
there is something, living
wordless –

even when the magpies perch
on the grey typewriters
of the horizon, tapping out
flurries, the ghosts
of snow –

even in the midst
of the drifting boreal
depression

she is still there, golden

with her hair of weeping birch
& the last sweet smoke rising
from black tea & a clove cigarette

she sings my grandmother’s songs
across the cacophony of traffic.

even through the airways
clogged with invisible sensationalism
the press playing games with empty prose
& the twisting semantics of omission

i hear her clearly down every
street & alleyway, echoes knocking
over the newspaper boxes, scrawled
with the chalkdust

of words seen etched in my dreams
last night, words tattooed in paint
over the brick skins of buildings,

i hear the reverberation
of things i have not yet written

stopping trucks in their tracks.

b)

want to see your heart-
beat? she asked.

wet leaves, slick as tongues
lapping a whisper
on the pavement, black
soak of the rain
singing, my footsteps
a pulse in my ears.

look,
under the cardiac trees
she pointed to a mountain
ash

spreading out
like arteries from an
upside-down atria,

branching out into
bunches of red blood-clots,

exploding berries
falling up into the autumn
sky --

do you see it?
do you see?

everything exists already,
she says,

& you are just the
interpreter, the renderer;

the lungs &
the voicebox,

a hope.


c)

поки не пізно – бийся головою об лід. – олег лисгега, пісня 551
[before it’s too late – knock your head against the ice. -- oleh lysheha, song 551.]

i know she wants to breathe
the air above

push her words into my lungs

& i want nothing but to
hear clearly

everything echoing from
under novembering earth –

long light lays supine
across the grasses

&

they say she’s a drowned soul
but i know she will not die

unless i do not keep speaking

keep breathing –

i will not fall heavy
under the frightening whiteness
of the snowless sky,
the almost-silence
that echoes in the skull,

because i trust she’s singing –

deep in the woods
the rusalka presses her face
to the frost-riddled filigree

her verses float like
bubbles under the surface,

soul flowing on beneath
the body,

warm breath melting thin holes
like whispers

as disembodied poetry
grows that one
indelible voice –

& we are both chipping, carving,
scrawling away
the ice –