she is reading her blanket with her hands
I am humbled by the women and girls in my world, and I thank the great spirit for their presence. my métis grandmother, germaine proulx-boyce, taught me to embroider, to work with ribbon. I’m told I have hers and exilda dufort-lafrance, my great-great grandmother. I’ve passed these hands to my daughter, barb, and to my granddaughters, jessinia and mazie. these hands of mine love to write, and I’m told my great grandmother, rosina lafrance-proulx, was a poet, that she talked to the trees, to the plants and animals. and now she talks to me. more than fifteen years ago, rosina’s voice in mine, I woke up to the words “she is reading her blanket with her hands,” the birthing of the poems in this book.
Reviews
Sharron Proulx-Turner’s book she is reading her blanket with her hands encompasses love and death, journeys and discoveries. It is a powerful work dedicated to family and friends and reads like a mother’s song to her children, the way in which a mother will say listen, the way a mother will hope and dream. The book is also a dedication to women: the victimized, the paralyzed and the empowered.” ~ Mary Barnes, Prairie Fire
Sharron Proulx-Turner mixes an amiable prose with a verse so free it gets downright trickstery to unfold the small talk impulses behind the familial and the familiar into songs and meditations, prayers and autobiography. In the process, her notes dedicated to family and friends also reveal and revel in large chunks of the Canadian landscape and re-inscribe in those natural places figures that history erased, the figure of the particular contemporary Metis girl, woman, mother and grandmother she herself was and is, sitting centred on the blanket and “inviting anyone awake/ to take the chance/a lifetime of dreaming our selves/one small bird at a time.” ~Daniel David Moses
Samples
one crow sorrow two crows joy
for joy hendrickson-turner
green in the hills
like lines in a long & sensuous poem
each one a careful reflection of the next
sisters walking & something about crows & sand & clams & black bear beach, about rapid rivers & rivers wide as lakes. these were the beauties for us, the peace. the sand from the beach, coarse & hot & cleans the feet in seconds. acorns from a grandmother oak, leaves bigger than men’s hands. those great trees, the oaks & the maples & the white pines, growing in our backyard, our schoolyard & us playing marbles in the sand, making necklaces from pine needles, elegant & long. climbing trees. hiding in the bushes. kick the can all the way through to the big kids’ school.
we’ve walked together in all weather
in blizzards, laughing in the cold
in hail, running for shelter
in the company of birds
crows & hawks & ravens
magpies & whiskeyjacks & geese
osprey in the hot, hot sun
& chickadees in the bitter cold
we’ve walked through the chill of our childhoods
& into a prairie meadow
filled with the healing power of sage
of sweetgrass all around
& there your beauty
is intensified by your smile
your most excellent sense of humour
I remember when you were born
your smell after coming home from hospital
the smell of new life
of what joy can mean
in an embodied way
if I were to express my love for you, I would walk with you on the side of a mountain, the snow deep & us pumping our way from camera to tree, camera to tree, trying to take a photo, our footprints deep & slow & our laughter all around. the air there, in those mountains, has a quality that’s hard to describe – an intelligence & a voice, a story. & the two mountains with us in the photo, like sisters reflected in each other’s home.
high on a mountain
laughing
where a single moment
is worth more
in that instant
than years of not knowing
blood rushes to my fingers and the frozen blanket’s off the line
remembering joan marguerite boyce-turner, 1932-1986 they say it's hard to talk about death sometimes it's hard to talk about life death's a new beginning my mother isn't good to me when she's alive she doesn't like me right from the start she doesn't like me she says I try to kill her from in her womb tells anyone who'll listen I'm the biggest born a fat baby goat's milk bread and sugar's how I stay that way too slow for cow's milk is what they say soft in the head I'm the slowest to walk the slowest to talk I'm toilet trained very young and then begin to dirty my drawers again so I'm put back on the diapers I wear a diaper and suck a soother till I'm in school I'm beaten a lot and raped by many men and women and that's not just the half of it my mother says she destroys my childhood pictures as they come along some say I make that up and rip them up myself it's not true though so I never see a picture of that fat baby or the crosseyed girl with crooked teeth they are close my family thing is the closeness is unhealthy keeps the cocoon brilliant with its own poison my family touches wrong there's no telling who'll blackout and go hogwild there's one thing about my family though never a dull moment sharp knives maybe but never a dull moment because I see my family that way as a mass of bone and fibre and light for my kids and their kids' kids I stop the drinking the violence the incest not that I stop going there every sunday like a sun dial when my mother is alive I cook I clean take care of the kids and make sure the breakables are out of the way of the adults thing is I'm not no saint you understand no angel either but by golly gee holy smokes I'm workin’ on stuff and that there's one weird family I come from my mother phones me twice in my adult life the second time she calls she can't stop choking she quits smoking about six years or so before that's about the same time she switches from beer to rum and coke drinks to blackout she's at work when she calls she's crying and sounds scared and scary at the same time I go and pick her up and take her to her doctor this is a friday sunday she has emergency surgery they're going to remove her left lung they close her up after they open her and there's nothing there but cancer she's very ill from then on dies eight months later two days before my mother calls me up and choking I call her up to tell her today I'm leaving my husband so while my mother's dying I'm feeling pretty good and I feel guilty and ashamed and happier than I ever felt in my life not that I wish death on my mother but the knowing is so delicious so liberating I can see her dying every day after a few months she wants me to go to her house and clean every second day which I do she wants me with her when she goes to chemo she wants me to help her pick out scarves to cover her baldness she wants me to get her tea she wants me to feed her she wants me to soothe and swab the open sores inside her mouth she wants me to sing to her she wants me to massage her when she smells of cancer and morphine and death and her bones are her only curves and then her bones get the cancer too too painful to the touch and then her brain and then her brain forgets to tell her body what to do forgets to tell her body how to take her into death any day now the hospital folks say any day now day after day after day after day I love my mother for a long time after her death I'm sick with hurt and glee and anger and grief not any more though then this summer my mother comes to me in a dream she tells me she is different she can help me now she says she can come to me like my grandmothers I am not too comfortable with this so I frame a photo of my mom when she is just a girl a picture at her first foster home behind her left lung there's laundry on the line abuse and fear and danger that's just hangin out to dry
