Child at Batoche, 2010

ANDRÉA LEDDING

prairie light to sky to grass to ground & then the shadows cast

& they are absence of light as the gravemarkers are absence of life

& the horizon is a distant blue the clouds must cover but they are always stretched too thin or bunched up in the wrong places & the trees soak up the light & the trees hem the thin horizon & the trees march in frozen procession toward the graveyard casting round shadows on the mown grass & the gate is swung invitingly open to the grass the meadows the trees & the wire fence sags comfortingly between whitewashed poles & in the centre of a worn picket fence the grey timbered cross intersecting the medicine wheel made by a red river cartwheel raised to the sky like a target defying death or maybe saying here is the target where you shot me down my body in the cross-hairs of your rifle the puff of smoke as the General gave the order to fire & next the shovels swung by women to dig a hole big enough to bury so many bodies before they had to flee with their fatherless children

& in the foreground she stands arms open & says remember me today but she has asked me now to forget she was there & her feet trod the same paths of countless others come to pay respects keeping the grass from growing upward out of the ground & the ground growing upward out of the graves the holes the places of burial & that is where the grass grows from it grows from a place of remembering