When a feather falls to earth
Today should be marked by soft treading on a carpet the colour of blood exsanguinated from my lifeless shell. My skin should be dried and shaded the ashen colour of scalding desert sand.
It should be an event marred by design, churning shrapnel through throats in slow motion. Quiet, and confused tears draping a procession of small voices and of hearts twisted sick.
But an ethereal wind drifts lost at sea, deep in the vast expanse of a broken tumbling surge. Its raw power fills my lungs with air.
It mirrors my mind, as shiftless and unfaithful as the ocean that now washes me ashore, recoiling against the edge of a flat earth, rejecting me wholesale.
The sun burns driftwood about me into silent fossils, a memory now burned across my chest. An unbending truth has came to rest in a state of ever-clawing transfixion inside of the hole inside of me.
Mike Alexander is an Ojibway from Sean Lake First Nation and a first-year student at UVic.
