When White Hawks Come
I dreamt the spirit of the codfish:
in rafters of the mind;
fly out into the winter’s
blue night;
mirth off alder tendrils sashay;
while I set up
my winter tent;
four panels long—beams suspend
I sit & pull blubber strips aged in a poke bag;
I’m shadowing the sun as a new moon icicle
time melts when white hawks come.
Copyright © 2020 by dg nanouk okpik. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 30, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
“Traveling in dream state, waking up, as fast as I could, to write this piece, in bed. The dream ‘sashays’ as the poem is in constant movement but ‘suspended’ in old man forest. I stayed there in the blue night in ‘mirth,’ rapture, and in laughter.”
—dg nanouk okpik
dg nanouk okpik
dg nanouk okpik was born in Anchorage, where she spent much of her life, and her family is from Barrow, Alaska. okpik is Inupiaq, Inuit. She received an AFA in liberal arts / liberal studies from Salish Kootenai College, earned both an AFA and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program.