Song My Paddle Sings

Pauline Johnson's masterpiece pulses with the rhythm of water and the heart of a paddler moving through Canadian wilds. Born to a Mohawk chief and an English mother, Johnson wrote from between worlds, her poetry carrying the music of Indigenous oratory folded into Victorian form. 'The Song My Paddle Sings' captures the tactile joy of a canoe cutting current, each stanza a stroke, the poem itself becoming the paddle's song. It is water poetry that moves you bodily, that makes you hear the dip and pull, the lap of waves against birchbark. Johnson performed this work across North America, audiences stunned by a voice that blended the old Mohawk songs with English verse. This is not quaint nature poetry but a declaration of belonging, of a woman claiming the rivers as her birthright, of Indigenous knowledge rendered in language so alive it practically drips from the page. For readers who have never heard a canoe song, this poem is the doorway.