Draw Me The Sky is a chapbook of erasure poems drawn from De Religione, a work of theology written in the Wendat language around 1670 by Father Phillipe, a Jesuit missionary to the Wendat people in Québec.
The title, Draw Me The Sky, is an erasure of a short phrase in the text. ‘Draw me to the sky’ was the Jesuit attempt to render something close to ‘Help me get to Heaven’ in the Wendat language. As an erasure, the idea of ‘drawing the sky’ imagines various ways of gesturing towards, or approaching, the divine—myth, or even prayer. Soliciting another person to ‘draw me the sky’—to tell me their myths, or to show me how they pray—is a beautiful and intimate request, one that was tragically lacking from De Religione, and from the colonial missionary project in general.
