Can you taste this much beauty in your mouth of mouths, lick up this
much truth with your heart’s tongue? A song
in Mi’kmaq, a young native woman’s voice. Her body’s rain-like, inward
swaying to the tune, her hair blackbirds sleeping. This is not
the lost song of a tribe, but the translation of the healing
of a wound—from English to Indigenous, Beatles to ancient. What I hear
is familiarity. My ear knows, listens to what is left
after song stops: a voiceless hum like a beehive after
rain or snow—not fire. The mouth closes, but not as if a hawk swoops in.
Can you taste this much earth on your soul’s tongue, touch this
much intimacy with your spirit of spirits? Much
is said about birds’ skeletons weighing less than feathers, the cavities
inside the bones riddled with air, so a bird can ascend.
Bare notes inside a mouth, inside a room, fly.
A bird’s plumage weighs most because it lifts holy bones. This
is the secret inside the heart of hearts
of galaxies, planets, humans, mammals, birds:
Everything that exists translates the Unimaginable Unsayable
into the Known. Everything carries within the light
of the dark black night. Broken-winged blackbirds sing.
A woman’s mouth flings out notes nudging flight of the human heart.

Published in Conestoga Zen Anthology from Conestoga Zen Press, edited and compiled by Rustin Larson, 2021

You can hear Emma Stevens sing ‘Blackbird’ in Mi'kmaq here.