How strange is it that she gave me a book of Cree stories even though — neither of us is from this land of forests and muskeg,
Well then, I'll read about moosewa the moose and musqwa the bear,
the horrible carcajou — the wolverine, that I see so much of myself in,
And beloved Weesakeejak, the trickster,
who doesn't love him?
But I do wonder,
About what other words they may have in their language,
And the silly Europeans,
Romanticizing everything east and west of themselves,
Told us that every Native lived,
With more freedom than a monarch in one of our oriental palaces,
And it follows that such a people would have a very different view on love than we do,
Not a love that seeks to possess,
But one that sets the beloved free,
In this land of forests and muskeg,
How can I let you go when you're lovelier to me than their prairie sunrises?
You gave me a book of Cree stories,
Which I treasured because your soft hands once held it,
And I learned a bunch of animal names in the Algonquian tongue but I can't help but wonder,
Would they even let me call what I feel for you love?
And I'm not talking about,
How we're both girls,
I only mean that the one word I've found,
To capture how I feel for you,
Is not in Cree but in my own language,
rakshesa prema,
"Monstrous love"
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