Hibernation

by Ash Adams

 

You might first think of bears,

but consider the common poorwill, a bird

who nearly stops its own heart for weeks,

barely breathing in rocky outcrops

where bodies the colour of sand can disappear.

A poorwill becomes the desert to survive it.

Queen bees, too, burrow at the end of the season

and wake surrounded by a dead colony,

though scientists argue that theirs

is not real hibernation, almost in the way

that no one’s account is ever bad enough.

The question they ask you, my Indigenous child, is how much.

How much of you, with your white mother,

has a stake in this land?

But did you know that bears do not even hibernate?

Like badgers, bears slip into torpor

and sleep fat while the rest of the world dies,

but no story is simple and we often

do not pass on the right ones,

like a man who climbs inside a woman

and then blames her for it.

Sometimes I think

my body had to learn my mother’s story to know it,

which is why I am telling you, daughter,

about the bird called sleeping one.

There were years after when I was barely alive

yet stayed in the open, disappearing but showing up each day.

But I did not sleep.

I strained in the darkness until my eyes glowed.

I held winter inside me until I was winter.