The Place at Alert Bay

Standing high on the shoulders of all things, all things.

Creation pole reaching over my teeming island

That plays me at last a fountain of images.

Away from the road, life rising from all of us,

The grove of animals and our souls built in towers.

A music to be resumed in God.

Our branched belief, the power-winged tree.

Tree of meanings where the first mothers pour

Their totems, their images, up among the sun.

We build our gifts : language of process offers

Life above life moving, a ladder of lives

Reaching to time that is resumed in God.

Did the thunderbird give you yourself? The man mourning?

The cedar forest between the cryings of ravens?

Everfound mother, streaming of dolphins, whale-white noon.

Father of salmon-clouded seas, your face.

Water. Weatherbeaten image of us all.

All forms to be resumed in God.

For here, all energy is form : the dead, the unborn,

All supported on the shoulders of us all,

And all forever reaching from the source of all things.

Pillars of process, the growing of the soul,

Form that is energy from these seas risen,

Identified. Resumed in God.