Her Medicine
This body, I know better than a bird knows the
tree called home, perched in the leafy dreams and
summer madness that calls me to flight.
I have always dreamed I flew.
A purposeful seeking, I move over the canopy,
gaze at the tops of bark-skinned cousins, green hands waving below.
Their collected breath a sigh that carries me across unfamiliar terrain.
Always an alien visitor to the world,
I adore these shadow places none-the-less,
fear a lightening path burning like unholy resurrection,
the quickening, an elemental awe I cannot name.
Once, I heard my mother whisper to me, after she dropped her body,
deep in the low dark hours when sleep won’t come.
Her voice in my left ear, the most hesitant and mindful sound,
the way you speak to someone on a building’s edge or
a bridge above dangerous waters.
I woke alone in the dark, my pulse a steady throb in my throat.
Grief chokes like clay, traps this body so I must
struggle to move into my own future, my wings heavy with a
strange longing for the past that escaped me
day by day until I found myself in
this new place, this new life.
Now my hair glimmers silver, reborn to light.
I keep my wings in reserve, against the
dawn’s urging to take flight.
-Mihku Paul
When the Whale Spoke
Return
Last night I dreamed I heard the Earth groan;
felt her bone shift deep inside my skin.
I stood alone upon her shadowed spine
where ridges pronged with spruce emerge from stone.
Shimmering with iridescent spark,
a blade-edge moon hovered in the dark.
As a child I feared the stormy dark,
thinking I heard spirits howl and groan.
Outside my window lightning showed its spark,
electric motes cascading on my skin.
I lay in bed, my flesh felt turned to stone,
breathing deep to stretch my wrinkled spine
Hove up like some earthen spine,
Katahdin’s peaks and cliffs rise in the dark.
Bouldered arms and ribcage carved of stone
communing with the mighty White Pine’s groan,
Swaying with the wind against their skin;
anchored there beneath the moon’s bright spark
A fire, dying, still gives forth a spark
igniting fallow memory in my spine.
The flames contained within this trickster skin
burn brightly, chasing nightmares from the dark.
I hear a woman’s voice cry out and groan,
her restless heart bruising against stone.
The trail leads on past cedar, stream and stone.
Constellations light a distant spark.
The bear, Muin, lets out a growling groan,
stiffens midnight hair along his spine.
We two are travelers wandering the dark,
called to origin, trapped within our skin.
Muin and I cannot discard our skin
or change our muscled heart for one of stone.
He teaches me to welcome velvet dark,
guided by the moon’s shape-shifted spark.
We traverse Katahdin’s rocky spine.
I hear again the mountain’s echoed groan.
My confused skin immersed in brilliant spark,
a steady warmth flowed gently up my spine.
Katahdin’s song rose up from granite stone,
as sweet music replaced her beckoning groan.
The Author
Mihku Paul is the Executive Editor for Dawnland Voices 2.0. She is a Wolastoqey writer, visual artist and activist. Her most recent work can be found in Whitman on Walls!, and From Root to Seed: Black, Brown and Indigenous Poets write the Northeast. Mihku lives on an urban homestead in Portland, Maine where she tends her garden, raises hens and teaches traditional Indigenous agriculture techniques. Mihku is working on two manuscripts, Nebi and The Courtship of Proteus and at the 2023 Belfast Poetry Festival she will debut a collaborative work of experimental film and spoken word, Putep qotatokot-te elewestaq (The Whale Spoke) with an original soundtrack.
