Melissa Powless Day, A Bow Forged from Ash

 

bezhig.

This deer skin
become a moccasin
of deer skin, this shoe 

is the colour
of earth (no,
earth is the colour
of this deer skin shoe). 

The porcupine quills
are gone, the
foot is gone, the
great, round drum
is gone; 

this deer skin was
shaped by the drum
of the Earth. (“Moccasin Poem”)

I’d been hearing positive things for a while about writer, scholar and educator Melissa Powless Day’s full-length poetry debut, A Bow Forged from Ash (Wndsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025). The author biography at the back of the collection, while referencing her bpNichol Chapbook Award-shortlisted 2023 debut with Anstruther Press, also describes Day as “Anishinaabe and Kanien’kehá:ke from Bkejwangong Territory (Walpole Island First nation), with family ties in Six nations of the Grand River Territory,” and the book itself is described as “a journey of Indigenous reclamation.” The first poem in the collection that struck my attention was “Moccasin Poem,” clearly composed as an echo of Robert Kroetsch’s classic “Stone Hammer Poem,” which the acknowledgments confirm as a “re-tread” of his classic (and much referenced) piece, one that Day refreshes in entirely new ways. Across Kroetsch’s rhythms and steady pulse, Day translates his piece into the particulars of her own references and perspectives, writing the small moment of her subject matter and, akin to Kroetsch, turning it slowly to study all sides. She moves from the small moment out into directions stretching the length and breadth of her family, her landscape, her cultural space. “The deer skin shoe / stopped a finger / long enough for one / What the // The Anishinaabe (the / Potawatomi?) not // finding the mocc / cursed.”

Day’s poems are performative, gestural, precise; offering exact and propulsive rhythms that allow her lines a kind of hum, a thrum. There’s an agency she builds, and she holds, throughout the collection, composing poems from a secure foundation and understanding of her cultural and individual self, fully aware how resistance is absolutely required, offering song and breath and community. Set in first-person observation, her poems provide plays upon rhythm and sound, stories of returning home, and navigating the ongoing effects of colonialism, however benign the effects might first seem. “You tell me the soup is too hot / for Canadian tastebuds,” begins the poem “Gambian Peanut Soup,” “I remind you / Canada / Has little sway over my palate [,]” The poems are open-hearted, direct and experiential, a lyric etched with storytelling, grounded in a strong sense of self, and self within the larger space of community. Or, as the prose poem “Bezhgoozhi” begins:

            Time doesn’t stop on Walpole, just flows differently. A river melting into a lake – there’s more room where there’s more history. Currents hot and cold, fast and slow can spread their arms and legs, can dance and mingle with the old waters, the deep waters. Time on Walpole is like blue becoming green.

            August sunlight is the colour of elder bullrush, not gold but something richer amidst the upstart greens that drift with us. The brown spikes are these beings’ heads and they watch us with a stalky sway. A thousand eyes called seeds packed atop a single reed. In the fall, how many secrets rest in the wishes children blow into the wind?

            Do they know where the horses went?