What if you had been born? And with you, the sky—
in the night-ness of all things between
my dormant grief and his. And with you,
the sky a ribbon between my dormant grief and
his invisible fear. A ribbon from his chest to mine
invisible. Fear, a bird caught in flight from
his chest to mine. What if you had been born a bird?
Caught in flight from the night-ness of all things.
Angeline Schellenberg is the author of the Manitoba Book Award-winning Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016) and the KOBZAR Book Award-nominated Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020). A spiritual director-in-training, Angeline hosts Speaking Crow: Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic. Her third collection Paradigm Riffs is forthcoming with At Bay Press in 2024.
