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"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Ron Riekki

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Bállet

(With Each Line's Final Word from a Translation of a Poem by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää)

"the North chose us"
—Nils-Aslak Valkeapää,
from "I have no beginning, no end"

An Anishinaabe elder told me once how important it is to turn off
the world, the city world, the skyscraping world, with its intense lack of colors
when you consider the multitude of greens in the forests, where the visions
wait for us, and by us I mean the indigenous, and I have spent too much of my life—
and that's the correct phrase, a sad spending—drowned, when the woods are exquisite
and honest and real and here and now and my Saami ancestors tell us
that we should live like reindeer, become reindeer, and I am trying to become reindeer
and bear and elk and Arctic foxes and trees and rocks and fishes

and birds and birds and peace and more peace and more birds
and, when we were sane, forest-sane, we decided
that we
would marvel

at the night
in the North

the far North, where it is just us,

with the rest of the world so far in the distance, so polluting, and so strained