Indigenous Poetics in Canada

11. Getting (Back) to Poetry: A Memoir

11 Getting (Back) to Poetry: A Memoir Daniel David Moses 1. As a kid, I wasn’t much interested in poetry as such. The words, if I can separate them out, that must have meant the most to me, that added meaning to my world, that made my reality most real then, that first decade or so of my life, were the language that was used in church. The forms that language took, the songs of praise and celebration, the prayers, the year’s round of liturgy, those exotic, fantastic stories from the King James Bible (all these years later, I have yet to meet a shepherd or encounter, despite my family name, a talking burning bush), made God, etc., seem self-evident. The aesthetic richness, the whole emphatic style of the experience, as well as the warmth of the communal gathering— although I didn’t come to entertain such ideas about causes and effects/ affects till much later— made me feel good, made me feel more real, so I was more than willing to go along carelessly, probably thoughtlessly, with the crowd. Then the bishop patronized me. I’d spent the time—weeks? months?—preparing for my confirmation ceremony, memorizing, of course, but also trying earnestly to understand the ceremony. It had to do with the church my parents belonged to and took me to every Sunday; it had to do with the meaning of our lives on this Earth and after. I was a worker, growing up then on a farm, which made me a good student, even in Sunday school, maybe especially there, since already at that age, twelve—was it a case of me being precocious or there being slim pickings among the adult congregation?—I was already running a Sunday school class, telling the little ones the stories, getting them to at least feel their import. Perhaps it was slim pickings, since I don’t recall such a class for the intermediate kids, except the one that was leading me to my confirmation. 121 122 D A N I E L D AV I D M O S E S I’d expended all that effort, getting ready to take that next step in my growing up, and then, at that moment in the ceremony that should have given public recognition to my individual self or soul, the bishop got my name wrong. I whispered to the man leaning above me in his purple stole and surplice , with all the urgency a polite twelve-year-old dared, that my name was not Daniel Donald Moses but Daniel David Moses. How had it happened ? Daniel David Moses, a name with Old Testament heft, and the man had not been able to announce it right once. And David, my middle name, was also my father’s first name, which added to its biblical weight that of a legacy and my love for the man. That leader of the Anglican church grinned down into my oh so serious, bespectacled nearsighted hazel eyes, at my round brown visage—I picture us freeze-frame still, face to face across the altar rail—and confided with a whisper and a crinkle of amusement in the corner of his eye (I imagine it looked from the congregation like a fatherly interaction) that he thought it wouldn’t matter, that God would know the difference. While the bishop got on with the (I now have to assume) chore of bringing the rite to its conclusion in that brick church on the Six Nations reserve, I went back down the steps and sat in the pew next to the other few candidates , bowed my brush cut, and took no comfort from his reassurance of God’s omniscience. I must have been feeling angry and perhaps insulted and, I would guess, resentful, though what good those emotions did me, officially only at that moment an adult member of the congregation, I don’t know. “He’s just too lazy to fix it,” I would have told myself if I’d dared articulate my emotions. Or maybe too proud to admit he screwed up. Or maybe he just doesn’t really care about the ceremony. Or us kids. Or, I might also add, if I had at that age more of a sense of the history of our Mohawk-led community, the name Thayendanegea, Joseph Brant, Aboriginal United Empire Loyalist and missionary (1742–1807), whose name was not yet taught in our schools. I had to...