A Collection of Sky Stories by Gail MacKay
2017 CBC Poetry Prize longlist
Gail MacKay has made the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for A Collection of Sky Stories.
About Gail
Gail MacKay is an Anishinaabe-Métis woman from the Robinson Superior Treaty area who lives in Saskatoon and works as an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan in the College of Education. She has learned to appreciate the meaning of family and belonging and is ever grateful for the teachings of her ancestors. She defended her dissertation, Finding Indigenous Discourse Survivance and Sending it Forward, in the spring of 2017.
Entry in five-ish words
Love poems for Saskatchewan sons.
The poem's source of inspiration
"These poems were inspired by my love for my sons in moments of awe and gratitude contained by the expanse and comfort of the Saskatchewan sky. Our boys, whom we adopted at birth and age two, have made visible to me the connection made by the love and devotion of birth and adoptive families, our ancestors and an abiding land rootedness and sky orientation."
First lines
under an indigo sky
prayers drifted aloft
through cool night air
and still
for so long
the moon song
seemed to hold itself
above and beyond
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