At Odds of the Night My Sister Irene and I

At odds of the night my sister Irene and I would count our coins that we might run away

stepping off the fated path of pain that led me to the man whom I would love

So little do we know of these our lives that lead through dark and bitter labyrinths

sometimes to wind through sorrows unrelieved, sometimes to turn and climb through sunlit fields

My mother was shot when I was three years old. They brought us up to Anchorage to see her

I don't remember hearing she was dying. I cried for juice and then was let away

They took us down to live in Lower Kalskang with those who didn't care how we might wander

through the chaos of their junk days two melodies oft sung but rarely heard Often then we thought to run away to live under

the frozen moon and stars, like fairies in a world of glittering ice, tinkling with each breath

of polar wind, or walking with the freedom of the dead by daylight in the shadows of the living

Playing tricks on those whose anger lashed us with all the passing fury of a storm

Ah, bitter cold those days in Lower Kalsak. Love was like an eagle high above us, soaring high above our frozen valley

strewn with pleasures gnawed and splintered bones. And life for me exactly was my heart

A stone grooved deeply by slow ice born upon an unrelenting glacier sliding like a snake toward some vast hell Long were I then lost to angry lust like those around me

save for two bright angels. Strangers moved to pity by my suffering

who sent me to the Wrangell Institute. There was a serenity of order strict with the insistence of wise love

and I could be a child once. again, safe to dream within my castle walls

And there I met my life's sweet love and light, the boy who would become my man, my husband

whom I'd not have found another way, and even as two children we knew love

After Wrangel Institute, I headed back to Lower Kalskag, for I knew no other place to

wait upon adulthood when I and my sweet boy could make a home I never knew I had an older brother now grown who met me at the Wrangell airport tore up my ticket vowed that I would never go back to live in such a hell again and sent

me to my sister in Bethel, a sister also whom I never knew, and there I stayed until

I finished high school, and joined again the partner of my life

We walked through rich and lovely fields together, filled with children, some who didn't live

know what I choose now to have suffered less upon a different path from birth to death

We cannot know where fate by chance may take us, or where the road through suffering may lead

or whether when we're most submerged in darkness, our steps are headed straight into the light