Come Home with Me

(Come Home with Me, by Athena, published in Murder of Crows April 2012)

Come home with me. I want to show you my Alaska, the place where I grew up. I want to show you my waterfalls, and green temperate forests, my lakes and lush valleys. I want to introduce you to the Sound where I learned to kayak and follow the salmon, and the cliffs where I’d hike to sit and write poetry at two in the morning under the midnight sun. I want you to meet my glaciers, and hear the sound of the calving ice, like thunderous laughter of gods and smell their winter breath. I want you to swim with me in azure waters so cold we have only each other’s bodies for warmth to stay alive. I want you to be welcomed by my purple fields of fireweed where I danced and sang and chased wolves. Mine was not the childhood of cul-de-sacs and neighborhood barbeques. Mine was a youth full of river rapids, ice and snow and epic mountains, northern lights and bears. My childhood was unsupervised and wild. Civilized only just enough not to be called… feral. I had twigs in my hair, scrapes on my knees and smelled of woods and lichen and sea salt. And I was happy.
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Come home with me. Come taste the low blueberries, the smoked salmon off the rack, and the shrimp fresh from the dock. Come listen to the rivers, and the elder’s drums and whale songs. Come dance with me the dance to greet the sun, or linger and watch the aurora slip in emerald and amethyst sand across the skybowl. Come taste the air, feel the earth and let me show you the love of my life, let me see it light your eyes and crack open your soul.

I want you to see Valdez, so when you peek into my heart, you will understand what lives therein; a vast jewel-hued wilderness ripe with promise, the basis of all my comparisons – then you will know my full meaning when I look you in the eye and tell you, “I love you.”