My name is Paudrigotuma and I love being in a place where you can look out at the cliff or the hills or the landscape and think this hasn't changed too much in the last 50 years, 100 years, 500 years.

But of course then so often in town or village or city, there's enormous change, such that it's almost impossible to imagine what the land looked

like before. But of late, even there, I begin to think, what did this place look like,

and what is the memory of that land here and what does it mean to be

informed by that land which has stood and been changed as a result of human

occupation and wars and industry what does it mean nonetheless to recognize

the land in which I stand?

Winter songs by Connor Care.

Two coyotes, full winter coats puffed out, follow their morning run through the back alleys and train tracks

under generations of graffiti and abandoned murals of 80 stand watch over their paw prints left in snow not yet spoiled.

Somewhere above magpies announced their arrival into the territory,

angels welcoming gods of a city gone back to the land through

trumpet fair and the remnants of an old Canada anthem playing on endless repeat from abandoned stadiums.

Two coyotes walk back 150 years to a time before skyscrapers and suburbs.

Man-made lakes, dams, bridges and power plants

and dig up the bones of ancestors laid along the riverbanks.

Watch them rise up to dismantle the structures placed on top of quarter sections that

divided a country.

They spool back barbed wire and let the bison pound the houses into kindling for their winter fires, marble legislature pillars crushed under the weight of an elk

skull. A coyote's god lives in bones. The Connor Carer is a poet as well as an award-winning novelist and this poem is so cinematic

you can see what's happening and so much of time and space and setting and change

and the restoration of things is mentioned in these few hundred words.

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