A need has arisen.

[Angeline]

My Sister's Eyes
Lorna Crozier

My sister who never followed me
was awkward, yet a graceful
lovely thing. Armless,
her hands sprouted
from her shoulderblades,
fingers splayed into fins.
Round hard buds
blunted legs that never grew
yet in the salty sea
she flipped
and somersaulted,
eyes wide open
and green as light
inside a leaf.

Even then I knew
I'd forget most things
but not my sister
or the underwater cave
where we swam to sleep.

My fingers, each distinct
and whole, no flap
of skin between,
made trails on the soft
enfolding walls
like those a snail will leave
as it eats its way across
the algae-skin of stone.

Guided by the green
of her amazing eyes
bone by bone I drew
our mother's face
so I would know someone
when I had to leave my sister
and learn with awkward grace
to love the world.

 

[champagne1982]

My Sister's Eyes
Lorna Crozier

My sister who never followed me
was awkward, yet a graceful
lovely thing. Armless,
her hands sprouted
from her shoulderblades,
fingers splayed into fins.
Round hard buds
blunted legs that never grew
yet in the salty sea
she flipped
and somersaulted,
eyes wide open
and green as light
inside a leaf.

Even then I knew
I'd forget most things
but not my sister
or the underwater cave
where we swam to sleep.

My fingers, each distinct
and whole, no flap
of skin between,
made trails on the soft
enfolding walls
like those a snail will leave
as it eats its way across
the algae-skin of stone.

Guided by the green
of her amazing eyes
bone by bone I drew
our mother's face
so I would know someone
when I had to leave my sister
and learn with awkward grace
to love the world.

Oh! This speaks a world of sorrow. Imagine, taking a drug to help you through your pregnancy and then, too late, discovering the damage done. Thanks for sharing this one, Ange... I'm off to find more of this lady's words.

 

[Guest]

Joni Mitchell

"coyote"

Anything, for you.


No regrets Coyote
We just come from such different sets of circumstance
I'm up all night in the studios
And you're up early on your ranch
You'll be brushing out a brood mare's tail
While the sun is ascending
And I'll just be getting home with my reel to reel...
There's no comprehending
Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes
And the lips you can get
And still feel so alone
And still feel related
Like stations in some relay
You're not a hit and run driver, no, no
Racing away
You just picked up a hitcher
A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway

We saw a farmhouse burning down
In the middle of nowhere
In the middle of the night
And we rolled right past that tragedy
Till we turned into some road house lights
Where a local band was playing
Locals were up kicking and shaking on the floor
And the next thing I know
That Coyote's at my door
He pins me in a corner and he won't take "No!"
He drags me out on the dance floor
And we're dancing close and slow
Now he's got a woman at home
He's got another woman down the hall
He seems to want me anyway
Why'd you have to get so drunk
And lead me on that way
You just picked up a hitcher
A prisoner of the white lines of the freeway

 

[Angeline]

Oh! This speaks a world of sorrow. Imagine, taking a drug to help you through your pregnancy and then, too late, discovering the damage done. Thanks for sharing this one, Ange... I'm off to find more of this lady's words.

It's beautiful! I had tears in my eyes after I read it.

I disovered all the poets I've posted in the thread at this site:

Canadian Poets

I love this thread for leading me to such wonderful poetry. I Canuckians.

yeah, you were right darkmaas. i shoulda bought the Bloom book. don't let it go to your head.

 

[bluerains]

Quietpoet

and his family take great honor in sharing the ways of inuit sculpture and the ways of life of the land...Qps father has many stone from the carvers and wants to bring the art of the inuit to the world...here is some poetry from the north..for you sweetie...ty..

Poems
By Carolyn Marie Souaid



From Snow Formations

Threads

The danger is not what you know
but what you think you know.

Someone famous said that or a fairy
fed it to me in a dream. Either way

the grenade I saw yesterday
on television might have been an artichoke.

And soft green words
might be a figment of your imagination.

Take that couple over there, in the half-light
of an evening tree.

Couldn't the man be mistaken? Couldn't her whispers
in his ear be the trickery of breezes and summer cottons?

Isn't it possible that the elm is really a flimsy
umbrella--

worse, the rainsoaked photo of a flimsy umbrella
coming apart in threads?

Chaos enters the brain swimmingly. Mere humans,
we realign ourselves, posturing.

****************************************

Symposium

We handed them God on a silver platter.
Do you know it took Him only one day to annihilate
the past? Which, of course, allowed them
to start over again.

In a flash,

He gave them light and a place to gather:
Pool halls and greasy shacks.
The world sugared white.

We took up the slack.

Served up their heart's desire: Export A
and an excuse to get up in the morning.
Vinegar on fries. Cameras to seize the day:

Dogs coveting cigarette butts,
An Elder's rotten keyboard of teeth.

We gave them mercantile lust
and the cunning
to turn 4,000 savage years
into art.

See that sky up there? That was us, too.

We gave them television,
liberalism, tampons, Pampers,
Pop tarts, tooth paste, acne, tartrazine.
Did I mention Sugar-pops? Xanthan gum,
Hubba Bubba, Boy George,
Ringo, Paul, John, and Love, all they needed.
With protection (which, of course, they still won't use).
The rest just came: Woodstock, Hollywood, the World
Wide Web.

The nerve of them saying we stole their land.
Such a small thing.

****************************************

Artifacts

Assorted broken dolls
by a grave site,
armless, nude,
eyes obliterated
by centuries of ice.

One might confound them
with those running
wounded
from their men:

Eskimo wives
in southern dress,
bandaged
in the stubborn moss
of June.

Don't.

****************************************

Inukshuk

That brown speck on the tundra
that thing like lint
on a white dress,
that's me.
Move a little closer.

Seems I've been here since the Vikings,
since way before you.
For years, I've watched the herds
come and go. The river.

I can certainly tell you a little something
about bearing up, stalwart. Resilient.
Unaffected by the rose moss
springing in a breeze,

the teardrop
clouds.

Let me tell you about the stone
will. How, even through the
poignant light of softer days
I go on, standing.
Visibly intact. Touch me,
and I fall apart.

****************************************

Still, Life

From the graveyard everything looks good.
Shrouded, now, in white,
crystallized, I see that.
I also see carbonized snow
as a good thing.

Pardon my cynicism, my failure to acknowledge this
sooner. I'll get to the point.

How many of us ever take time to enjoy
the Earth's exquisite intricacies? Victorian lace.
Spider-webs. The organza wing
of a common fly.

Who, among us, actually hears
bracelets in the chilly wind? A rattlesnake
coiling through light?

Put it this way.
Next time you claim to be bored,
visualize brownish-blackish grim nothingness
and then feed on the world,
one breath at a time. Imagine the tang
of unusual spices on your tongue;
red dust falling
lightly
from a powdered stamen.

Loosen the flower, drink some wine,
make your solemn declaration
singingly--

I can't even imagine not being here.

****************************************

From Satie's Sad Piano

Prologue
The New Millennium


The bishops feared a dip on Wall Street,
flashfloods, tornadoes, snow squalling
in tongues, the chickens awry,

–-a white, interstellar madness.

They predicted the harvest in tatters,
provisions under the staircase
stupefied into dust.

The prescient would hear it coming:
a week early, demons in the glassware,
heirloom dinner plates shifting
imperceptibly,

a chink in the rattling air.

They feared 40 days & 40 nights
of blighted, non-believers
spitting up blood, bile, the Seven Deadly Sins
of the rainbow

bruised & shaken, the last conscious radio
issuing prayers for the End.

But midnight came & went, dragging its long face,

& spring arrived, as always: seeded
with light.

****************************************

By whose leaden will did I fall
into fall’s most alluring musk?

Who deranged the senses

such that I nosed beyond the knowable
road, the tactile

alligator bark of trees?

Who sent me gibbering into my
simple, primitive brain?

Father, I know not that I have sinned,
merely this:

I would as soon travel blind
as inhabit earth’s pedestrian corridors.

Lured by the cinnabar waltz
of leaf on leaf,
gold sniffing out rust.
Delusional.

Love thrown, whimsically,
my way.

****************************************

Summer hums with improvised gaiety.
In a parallel hemisphere.

Birdsong in ascending scale. Dawn gladdened
with mangrove, eucalyptus. Jubilant

over-the-moon kids promising
all the wrong things to each other.

So rapt, so absorbed in their own rhythm,
they’re unaware of the storm

making overtures on the horizon.

Because living hasn’t yet tapered off into
Satie’s sad piano.

Yes, the rest of the world seems to know

a thing or two about love’s bitter edge,
the dirge that wells up, unannounced,

to drown the Orphean blue. But who will say?
Having been there themselves. Having known

what it means to drag among the baritones,
but before that, what it really is to fly.

****************************************

The city awoke, refurbished. Yesterday’s euphony
of rain easing into birdsong.

After the long night, quiet restoration.

But whatever happened to those lovers
singing the raspberry blush of dawn?

I ask not out of anger or spite,
but out of genuine sorrow.

Sometimes, second thoughts
bear no resemblance
to second thoughts:

their failure to accommodate
the fluctuating light.

A rosebush beneath the window.
The last warbling stars,

bending away.

 

[Guest]

I'm just discovrering Pat Lowther who was murdered in 1975 by her husband who was also a poet but schizophrenic, Why do poets have to be so tragic?

Before The Wrecker Comes

Pat Lowther

Before the wreckers come,
Uproot the lily
From the hard angle of earth
By the house.
Crouch by the latticed understairs
Rubbish and neglect
(The sudden lightning
Of sun
On your back
Between the opening
And shutting
Of the March-blown clothesline,
Rise and fall of the swift light
Like blows.)
Here a lifetime's
Slimy soapsuds
Curdle the earth,
In this corner
Under the stairs,
But have not killed
The woodbugs
Nor the moths' pupae
Which brush your fingers
As you dig
For the round, rich root,
The lily root
Which has somehow, senselessly,
Not been killed either
But has grown every year
An astonished babyhood,
An eye-struck Easter.
Pack it among the photographs,
The silver polish,
And the last laundry
Which will not again
Lift and shutter
For the shattering sun.
Mark its container: X
Two intersecting lines,
A lattice point
Of time
And the years' seasons.

Before the wreckers come,
Carry away
The lightning-bulb of sun.