12 Days Of Catmus by Flora Jo – Reviewed here

Inspired by Erin Hunter

 On the first day of cat-mus my mate gave to me

A kit mother sitting in her cave…

 12 leader s dying

11 deputies hunting

10 medicine cats healing

9 warriors wounded

8 apprentices eating

7 queens-a-nursing

6 kits-a-feeding

5 elders

4 stone-tellers

3 prey-hunters

2 cave-guards

And a kit-mother sitting in her cave

REVIEW – Rose DeShaw

Flora Jo is a young Metis poet, presently in elementary school.  She knows cats, how the mother cat sits and surmises, how she tends her kits.  Flora Jo was seeking an update from the traditional English Lords & Ladies jumping about, along with all the now-irrelevant others in Flora Jo’s urban experience.  Carefully observing the rhythm of the song, she adds from her own experience, those who people her mind and life.

Fresh images these. The stone-tellers are her own but vivid in their naming. The prey hunters freshen an image we thought we knew.  The wounded warriors, the dying leaders speak of a wisdom way beyond Flora Jo’s years on earth. Daughter of an award-winning Aboriginal Poet (Wiles of Girlhood, Mother Time), some of the origin of care of the mother cat goes back to her own experience of being mothered. Such articulation is rare in one so young.

For whom are the deputies hunting? Flora Jo is a west-coast writer, conscious of the Aboriginal culture into which she was born and all the flaws and failures that rise from being part of the two cultures here in Canada.

Flora Jo has freshened The Twelve Days for me forever. I shall read this every Christmas and remember.