The Burial Feathers – by Yasmin Smith
WINNER OF THE GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2024
The afternoon’s powerlines are pebbled
with the chalky plumage of white cockatoos,
tipped with overblown flaxen feathers.
In the afternoon’s unfixed light,
I am reminded of the funeral parlour.
Deceptively, its starkness takes me
to the day before we buried my mother.
A stranger the shape of a treble clef
compliments my medicine pouch.
Strung from my neck with dried sagebrush
and a pinch of late Montana,
where Little Sun, my great-grandfather
is beneath the ground in Rosebud County.
I think of that weeping moment,
in the burial plains of Lame Deer,
where my grandmother lay on her father’s grave.
To never know his bitterroot scent,
to never swim southwest in Flathead River,
to never touch his elk-stretched hands.
Little Sun, turned to Morning Star,
my grandmother’s Native name,
and now we are here, burying my mother.
I am unsure what to say to the stranger.
I did not see her coming. She is featureless
now in dour memory, as I walk towards the
entrance.
The feathers I hold with me are deathless.
Sunburnt black, tainted with strokes of tangerine,
fallen from red-tailed cockatoos.
I am regifting, returning them to my mother.
Even so, I am unsure of how to cross over
to move into the swell of the funeral parlour.
I fixate on memories, the places she knelt
to find them under the casuarinas.
Patiently dropped from drawn-out nests,
these feathers are opulent and heavy.
I am lured firstly to the weaving loom
poised beside the maple casket.
My grandmother sits with the length of her braid
shoulder-looped, and unmoving like weft.
The loom itself is empty. No tapestries nor yarn,
no large-eyed needle, nor shuttle, nor comb.
I am careful not to touch my mother
as I ornate her with a warbonnet in death.
Neon sunrise to midnight crow,
wildfire persimmon to onyx black pearl,
obsidian dream to smashed-pumpkin hex.
Nothing passes in, as I leave this halo
feather by feather, round her still silhouette.
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Image: David Clode/Unsplash
This poem appeared in Island 170 in 2024. Order a print issue here.
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