I tried to defend you,
I thought there might be
Someone else who loved you
As I love you.
Here I am, beneath you
Caressing your precious timber,
Protecting you with my hands
From those who claim to love you.
Lies!
They see you bleed and they laugh as they stuff their pockets
With dollars, from your suffering.
She walked a painful lane home
wiping tears of change
from her soiled body
but told no one about those fakes
Now her poison intake
lays skin on her bones
perspires with naked truth
Reading her medical record
as three little words
holding back the years
We present this work in honor of the Canadian holiday, National Aboriginal Day.
Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you
it might turn out instead
to be about me
or any one of
my female relatives
it might turn out to be
about this young native girl
growing up in rural Alberta
in a town with fewer Indians
than ideas about Indians
in a town just south of the ‘Aryan Nations’
It might turn out to be
about Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall, or Richard Cardinal,
it might even turn out to be
about our grandmothers
beasts of burden in the fur trade
skinning, scraping, pounding, packing
left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,’
left for white-melting-skinned women,
not bits-of-brown women
left here in this wilderness, this colony.
Betty, if I start to write a poem about you
it might turn out to be
about hunting season instead
about ‘open season’ on native women
it might turn out to be
about your face young and hopeful
staring back at me hollow now
from a black and white page
it might be about the ‘townsfolk’ (gentle word)
townsfolk who ‘believed native girls were easy’
and ‘less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence’
Betty, if I write this poem.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 30th birthday.
If you had met me pure,
without a bad conscience,
without sorrow in my dreams,
without bites from others rooted in my shoulders.
Would you have bathed me in the morning light,
licked the sleep from my eyes,
stroked my insomnia,
caressed my wrinkled hands with your teeth?
And if I had dressed up
in something to look like you,
if I had lied to you telling you my truths,
if I had told you that you were the only one
and not the first.
Would you have undressed me with your eyes closed
and your expert hands,
kissed me while I told you about my life,
placed your name and mine
on a pedestal
and made this a love between equals?
And if I had sold myself
as the love of your life,
if I had bought you
as the love of mine.
Would we have fallen in love
like someone who loves herself
loving the one she loves?
We present this work in honor of the South African holiday, Youth Day.
I am with those
who abuse sex
because the individual doesn’t count
with those who get drunk
against the abyss of the brain
against the illusion that life
once was good or had beauty or sense
against the garden parties of falsehood
against the silence that beats into the temples
with those who poor and old
race against death the atom-bomb of the days
and in shacks count the last
flies on the walls
with those stupefied in institutions
shocked with electric currents
through the cataracts of the senses
with those who have been depraived of their hearts
like the light out of the robot of safety
with those coloured, african dispossessed
with those who murder
because every death confirms anew
the lie of life
And please forget
about justice it doesn’t exist
about brotherhood it’s deceit
about love it has no right
The banner of your body floats in the Brandenburg wind.
An old woman wants to come in, I
can see her through the door, her red felt hand
pressing in vain on the latch, scraps
of her cries come at me like the barbaric
song of a violin mending the night;
I’m going to slip a rose under the door
a black-blooded rose, maybe she’ll go away?
And I could wallow in the bramble hammock
but her voice hiccups: Ophelia
My name is Ophelia, open the door, O-phe-lia…
—What do I care about her grotesque distortions
What lie will she bring me? Why
doesn’t she extend it to me through the sheets
of sand the way she extends her name… Ophelia
Ophelia, her shadow ricochets in the aura
of my dusk. Ophelia, her voice grates
like a leper’s rattle, philia, figlia…
A world there is for those in love with mines of precious stones,
But bards select a different world as setting for their thrones.
The bird who eats love’s magic grain lives on another plane —
His nest beyond both worlds, ignoring riches, scorning fame.
Here I will never hear the cuckoo’s call.
Here trees will never wear the shtreimel-snow.
Yet here in the pine’s shade I can hear all
My childhood, brought to life from long ago.
The needles chiming: Once upon a time
“Home” was the word I gave to snow, not sand,
And the brook-fettering ice- a greenish rime
Of my song’s language in a foreign land.
Perhaps the voyaging birds alone who find
Their own route hanging between the sky and earth,
Know how I pine between two lands of birth.
In you I was transplanted, O my pine.
In you I branched into myself and grew
Where disparate landscapes split one root in two.
Sometimes I wonder
how much longer I shall be here
to bite your hair
with my wooden toothcomb.
I am not afraid
of the freeze of frail fingers;
there is something
romantic about loss.
But I worry about the uneven rhythm
of the diviner’s hand,
the widening waist
that filters sand.
I worry that time
rests its hand on doorknob
and taps the floor
with its iron toe tip.
Somehow,
I must show you
the tricks my mother didn’t teach me;
tell you the tales that never reached me.
But if time will spurn
a mother’s wish
or turn its face away
from a daughter’s need,
remember this, little one:
a life lived well is a wave in flight;
discarded dreams
draw out painful night.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 130th birthday.
The sky a black sphere,
the sea a black disk.
The lighthouse opens
its solar fan on the coast.
Spinning endlessly at night,
whom is it searching for
when the mortal heart
looks for me in the chest?
Look at the black rock
where it is nailed down.
A crow digs endlessly
but no longer bleeds.
Poets Corner 