We present this work in honor of Canada Day.

‘Tis evening, and the round red sun sinks slowly in the west,
The flowers fold their petals up, the birds fly to their nest,
The crickets chirrup in the grass, the bats flit to and fro,
And tinkle-tankle up the lane the lowing cattle go,
And the rich man from his carriage looks out on them as they come—
On them and on the barefoot boy that drives the cattle home.

“I wish,” the boy says to himself—“I wish that I were he,
And yet, upon maturer thought, I do not—no siree!
Not for all the gold his coffers hold would I be that duffer there,
With a liver pad and a gouty toe, and scarce a single hair;
To have a wife with a Roman nose, and fear lest a panic come—
Far better be the barefoot boy that drives the cattle home.”

And the rich man murmurs to himself: “Would I give all my pelf
To change my lot with yonder boy? Not if I now myself.
Over the grass that’s full of ants, and chill with dew to go—
With a stone bruise upon either heel, and a splinter in my toe!
Oh, I’d rather sail my yacht a year across the ocean’s foam
Than be one day the barefoot boy that drives the cattle home.”

We present this work in honor of the 95th anniversary of the poet’s death.

For a name unknown,
Whose fame unblown
Sleeps in the hills
For ever and aye;

For her who hears
The stir of the years
Go by on the wind
By night and day;

And heeds no thing
Of the needs of spring,
Of autumn’s wonder
Or winter’s chill;

For one who sees
The great sun freeze,
As he wanders a-cold
From hill to hill;

And all her heart
Is a woven part
Of the flurry and drift
Of whirling snow;

For the sake of two
Sad eyes and true,
And the old, old love
So long ago.

We present this work in  honor of the poet’s 120th birthday.

A spider’s body
limp and hairy
appeared at the bottom of my coffee

The waiter being Castilian
said passionately nothing
And why indeed should apologies
be made to me

It was I who was looking in
at the spider
It might be years
before I slipped and drowned
in somebody else’s cup

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 90th birthday.

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 105th birthday.

The still grey face and withered body:
without resistance winter enters in,
as if she were a stone or fallen tree,
her temperature the same as the landscape’s –
How she would have complained about that,
the indignity of finally being without heat,
an insult from the particular god she believed in,
and worse than the fall that killed her –
Now a thought flies into the cemetery
from Vancouver, another from Edmonton,
– and fade in the January day like fireflies.
I suppose relatives are a little slower
getting the evening meal because of that –
perhaps late for next day’s appointments,
the tight schedule of seconds overturned,
everything set a little back or ahead,
the junctures of time moving and still:
settling finally into a new pattern,
by which lovers, hurrying towards each other
on streetcorners, do not fail to meet –
Myself, having the sense of something going
on without my knowledge, changes taking place
that I should be concerned with,
sit motionless in the black car behind the hearse,
waiting to re-enter a different world.