After our son died, my wife found him in coincidences—sightings of hawks, mostly, at the oddest of times and places, and then in a pair of redtails that took up residence, nesting in a larch above our barn, and how their low, frequent sweeps just a few feet above us before rising over our kitchen roof made it seem as if they were looking in on us. In a way, it all made sense, our son so at home in high places—the edges of mountain trails, walking on a roof, or later, after he became a house painter, at the top of a forty-foot ladder. So many mornings we woke to the redtails' jolting screeches and, even if I was a casual believer, their presence multiplied my love for the ordinary more every day. We never thought, of course, any of those hawks was our son— who would ever want that?—but, once, watching one rise and rise on a draft of air, I thought of Icarus soaring toward the sun— as if an old story could provide the distance I needed—waxed and feathered, his arms winged, and remembered a babysitter's frantic call to come home, immediately, after she'd found our ten-year-old nearly forty feet up in an oak tree. I can almost hear him again, laughing high up in the sky, throned on a branch, his feet dangling, knowing nothing but the promise of heights as he waved to me— and I must have looked very small calling up to him, staying calm so falsely as I pleaded with him to come down, to come down now.
"Bhanu Kapil has won the most valuable award in British poetry, the TS Eliot prize, for her 'radical and arresting' collection How to Wash a Heart, in which she depicts the uncomfortable dynamics between an immigrant and her white, middle-class host."
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"The English translation is a reminder of linguistic colonization. English now surrounds both Irish and Ojibwe, but in my translation is not the primary vehicle for interpretation. Providing an English version of the poem ensures it can be read by Ojibwe speakers who may not know Irish and Irish speakers who may not know Ojibwe. It also reflects that this is a poem primarily concerned with the connection between Irish and Ojibwe which is a decolonial act of reclamation."
