At the 2018 Saskatchewan Arts Awards, Artistic Excellence recipient Marjorie Beaucage read a poem she wrote in place of her acceptance speech:

For artists

i love you for your fierce truth
for the fight and healing you breathe in your walk
for all the times you have cried in your room alone
for everything that is happening right now
for everything that you have wept
and screamed for
for all the ways you voice
fierce art fierce medicine
for being voice
despite
how many times they told you
to make it something else
say it another way
be more discreet
despite how soft you had already spoken it

and you stood there
speaking truth to power to voice
to unsilence the waters
unsilence the fire
to comfort the discomforted
discomfort the comforted

you stood there
with shaky voice
trembling hands
eyes full of water on fire
you spoke it
despite it all
you said it
you wrote it
you scribed it
you painted it
you filmed it
you danced it
you sculpted it
you framed it
you carved it
you wired it
you build it
over and over
you spoke it with your hands
while you doubted it
while you feared it
while you questioned it
while you mourned it
while you prayed it
while you kneeled and cried
when no one was looking
you embraced the medicine
to create another song another place
another home for us
to live another justice
another face another name
another borderless impossibility
you brought into the possible
i love you for this mirror
you are my mirror i was born to see
you are my mirror i was born to remember
you are my mirror i was born to scream with
cry with laugh with dance with
remember dreams while awake with

i love you for your fierce creation
all of you
that are and aren’t like me
you that fall inside of this and outside of me
and remember
to remember we are never alone
in this struggle
in this moment
where all the oppression
and all the justice
all the universe
just moves
in sacred motion
and we move with it
with all the parts carved in our dna
in our souls waiting for the next movement

Photo: Michael Bell Photography