
Canadian Poet and Teacher Juleta Severson-Baker
My Wild Body
happiness of the world
came to me again.
My body effervesces,
I think with my body which effervesces.
-Anna Swir, trans. Czeslaw Milosz & Leonard Nathan
At 15, all the happiness of the world
was a horse and my best jeans, halter in hand
and boots with a one inch heel, every morning
a July morning in the foothills; the sun unfurled nothing
but promise over each day. Girl heart, horse heart
who could say whose was more huge?
Woman heart, man’s, your hand on my back
reveals old pain where the old camp horse bucked
me off, vertebrae smashed. Evenings now we sit around
and age and call it love while our bodies remember risk
and ache a little. But I am the same girl at heart and wildness
comes to me
again. I think and I am. Riding at dawn
hard down a cutline, alone
but for time-lapse grass growing
a never-newer sun, rushes slowly offering
seeds to the breeze. I am finite. Nevertheless,
my body effervesces.
I was meant for horses,
the scent of them, hay sweet and yeses.
Lub-dub is hoof beat and horizon,
heartbeats connected. Time is a trick of lonely so
I think with my body which effervesces.
Juleta Severson-Baker, 2022, from her upcoming book ‘Antecedent’, Frontenac House Press, fall 2023)
Hello, Recovering Words readers! I’m so happy to have been invited by Richard to write for his richness of a blog. This week I’ll introduce myself and in my next blog post I’ll introduce another poet – Tenille K. Campbell.
So…who am I, where am I, what has created and shaped my poet self?
I situate myself in the milieu of art-makers who turn to their very bodies and the personal histories lived therein for whispers of muse. Coupling introspection (which I experience best as a physical process, as body-spection, if you will) with a close listening to the friendly voices of birds, the secret language of wind, the abiding mysteries of rock and the wriggly chatter of little creatures in the soil and you have some idea of from whence words come to me.
I grew up as a city girl in the suburbs of Calgary, Alberta in the 1970s. Descended from Norwegian farmers and English labourers – chauffeurs and mechanics – who worked for the landed gentry, I heard stories of my Dad’s childhood on a Saskatchewan farm, and my maternal Grandfather’s days hunting rabbits around his English village in the years between the world wars and romanticized their connection with the natural world. Truly, I longed for a life in the country. I ran and danced around a soccer field near my house at dusk imagining I was Laura Ingalls Wilder playing on a midwestern prairie with no neighbours in sight. As soon as I could, I cajoled my parents into paying for horseback riding lessons. While on horseback I felt ecstatically at home in my wild body.
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