100 Refutations | Canada | English | Poetry
June, 2018god only knows, Mary tried to say these things but
her lips cracked and
words fell out like
mad woman’s change
god only knows she tried but
we all thought she was crazy
a little twisted, Mary was
in one of her spins again
who knows who she would twist into it,
like hair in a french braid
god knows Mary tried
to keep us clean and fed, respectable but
all the bleach and soup bones
in the Red & White couldn’t keep our
halfbreed hides from showing through
An award-winning writer of Cree/Métis ancestry, Marilyn Dumont earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has been widely published in literary journals around the world. Marilyn’s first collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets. This collection is now in its eleventh printing, and selections from it are widely anthologized. Her second collection, Green Girl Dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. That Tongued Belonging, her third collection, was awarded the 2007 Anskohk Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year.
These is not a translation, but rather an English poem written by author Marilyn Dumont.
Copyright (c) Marilyn Dumont, 2018.