I doubt Queen Charlotte knows or cares
the island's name
has been reclaimed by the first nation
natives who have lived there
some ten thousand years
in other words forever
in their art
and mythic poetry one feels the power
and depth of a tradition
formal and classical as our baroque
or Haydn's string quartets
a world now mostly lost
thanks to the smallpox
the colonial exploitation
and the onslaught
of TV and the social media
but in these echoes
newly re-imagined
after the texts Swanton transcribed in 1900
something surfaces
as if from the deep caverns
and swirling currents
of that world beneath the sea
where for love and longing
men and women
in seagoing canoes of yellow cedar
will cross the boundaries
of sea and sky
moving in realms where killer whales
appear in human guise
and dogfish husbands jealously
guard their abducted wives
the stories speak a language
no less powerful
nor less profoundly human
than the Greek poet
with his hero whose tears of longing
for his distant Ithaca
his Penelope
once set in motion
the course of that great journey of return

Are we literate folk ready at last
to hear the voices of these Haida mythtellers
whose words
a foreign music yet the themes
however dimly grasped
are rich with meaning
an affirmation of what binds us all
artist and audience to one another
moved by the metaphors the images
that hint at something we all share
of human loss
the poet's art
a work of symmetries
of beauty wrestled with consummate skill
and care from the great sea of words
that swirl around our common human griefs