Poetry
1 min
Reading The Signs, Walking The Words
Cassy Welburn
Cassy Welburn
Cassy Welburn is a Calgary storyteller and writer who shares her work across Canada. She was the Canadian Children’s Storyteller on Tour for 2013. Her tales are recorded on TALES on the Wind, Call Your Neighbours In #Alberta Writer
Reading The Signs, Walking The Words Cassy Welburn
Walking the dog
is a trick you do with a yoyo,
swinging it out to bounce
in front of you on the sidewalk,
but the young woman I see
has nothing in her hands.
Did you lose something? I call.
Maybe your dog?
She does not respond
until my shadow crosses hers
passing over the bridge. The river laughs
at our stick figures colliding, conniving
to be understood.
She turns to me, face blank,
hands flying, then frozen in time.
Where are the boats? She asks,
turning her hands into one, looking past me
to the people in rubber rafts racing down the river,
one after the other, raucous with glee.
Are you lost? Are you ok? I shout.
O K she signs, forming the o hand and k fingers
I remember from an early childhood class I taught.
What is she trying to tell me?
From his fingers, I am rain. That can't be right—
It's hard to follow the flying language
when you have only a child's vocabulary.
I just want to jump in. Her words spit out like stones.
Bad Idea, I sign, quickly touching my right
hand to my lips and flung away, then an ‘i' finger off my head.
I used to love writing out words like this, a tree elbow in the palm
of your hand falling with a crash, or the curling fist
of the sun rising from the other elbow to the noon-day
of your forehead, only to set again down past your forearm.
His eyebrows cast shadows, I think her hands are telling me.
The body is paper and ink. He was a difficult language,
How hard she works at building me the story I can almost see.
The man visits the moon, she probably said. Sometimes
The voice you cannot hear is the clearest, if you hear only hands
She looks at me now, as though seeing me for the first time.
I just want to jump in a boat—she signs, carefully,
slowly, reading my face—and float away.
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