Mother language filters through
leaves somewhere, a green bird
complaining, tak tak tak how swift the flicker
from hatch to fledging, how wide
the sky that swallows tiny chick
hearts, leaving only surrender

Moja matka jest jej babcią
Already! My mother, her grandmother

Language shimmers down blue flumes
she never knows, this leatherback gal
when next, tak tak on the roll and tumble, her own
child will come spangled in bubble, in flow
homing by the amplified hum of her
this one green certainty among the rest
Tak tak below memory, the nest

matkować infinitive
imperative, to Mother!

Doll in doll, hand in hand
Fizyka kwantowa flowering
głosy snap above the firebowl tak!
Tak tak!
sparks in space, my reaching hand
either przypalony or ciemny
scorched or dim
or empty, potential and brimming

odbierać i przekazywać
To receive, and to give/pass on/relay

Or some less technical expression
Flickering birdlike, swimming seaward
dropped, kicked, carved, dreaming
Their lines in my hands, tak tak tak

i tak dalej i tak dalej i tak

***

Tiny Polish Glossary

tak - yes, so...
i tak dalej - and so on
fizyka kwantowa - quantum physics

February 2024 Creative Corner prompt response, published with the author's permission. Copyright © 2024 by Anna Marie Sewell. Sign up for our newsletter for a chance to be featured on our blog, Pensieri.

Anna Marie Sewell is an award-winning multi-genre writer and performer of Mi’gmaq/Anishinaabe/Polish descent living in Edmonton, Canada. Her artistic practice centres collaborative projects at the intersections of culture, language, and modality, including Ancestors & Elders, Reconciling Edmonton (which featured the first ever Round Dance at Edmonton's City Hall), Braidings, Honour Songs, Heart of the Flower, Big Sky Theatre (theatre with urban Indigenous youth), and The PoemCatcher public art installation. A founding member of the Stroll of Poets, she has served as Edmonton's 4th Poet Laureate (2011-2013) and MacEwan University's 2019/20 Writer in Residence. Connect to Anna Marie Sewell’s written work through prairiepomes.com, via her poetry collections Fifth World Drum (Frontenac House, 2009) and For the Changing Moon: Poems & Songs (Thistledown Press, 2018), via her debut novel, Humane (Stonehouse Publising, 2020), or the sequel, Urbane (Stonehouse Publishing, 2023). Anna Marie was published in The Polyglot’s Issue 3, CanLit: Curating our Canons, and Issue 6: nimitêyaniy.

Being as Matryoshka by Anna Marie Sewell