Geomantic riposte: 'Unearthed'
A Mohawk writer from the Six Nations band in southern Ontario, Janet Marie Rogers was born in Vancouver BC and has resided in Victoria BC since 1994, where she is currently rounding out her three year term as that capital city’s Poet Laureate. A published and award-winning poet, she has many notable works to her name and in a variety of media. Roger’s radio documentary Bring Your Drum (50 Years of Indigenous Protest Music) has aired on CBC and won the Best Radio award at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Festival in 2011. As outspoken as she is judicious (and also called a spiritual descendant of the lively Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson by poet and playwright Daniel David Moses), Rogers demonstrates in her collection Unearthed her ability to combine spoken word protest with more formalistic page poetry, and also her catalytic role when sharing her gutsy, realistic, and inspirational voice for First Nations people on either side of the 49th Parallel (for those who believe in such a thing).
Unearthed by Janet Rogers (Leaf Press, 2011, Page 72)
each night he greets
the blue clad lads
offering to escort him home
his magic does not work on them
entire cities can be erected
in the gaps of their misunderstanding
drunken shaman
is not a victim
he chose to be
the visual reminder
of our delicate successes
teaches us what not to teach
the children
and he survives
a life
many of us
could not
Geomantic Riposte: Grapple
there is no pamphlet for this incoherence the
text no larger than the limbs of fleas writ in a
language that has long gone by passed along
through elemental
shifts signs that are opaque roving
across strange plains to our West Coast <question
mark>
Pauline & Pound snacking back Long-
fellow
dipped in Swinburne
hiding history in hollows of trees North
before the linguistic split, before movement
what were we to one another
heed this cry
for strength and clemency suo moto cognizance
grasp this abrupt boule-
versement
of recontextualized charms
and portage enough light
and magic
to grapple with the small
slate-coloured thing