poetry photography music
Beachcombing
the net you cast
is never a trap:
it is the hammock
where I rest my
thoughts: the welkin
and the forest-wild
that you weave
together for me:
your blue-
green threads:
the trim
on the shore
that I strive
toward
from Wavelengths of Your Song (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
My print copy of Magma (UK) arrived in the mail with my poem “Paradise Evacuated”. From the editorial: “Throughout the issue, we have scattered poems that made us think, feel or laugh and often all of those at once. They raise words which connect bone with breath and dance across the razed, airless spaces in which we are otherwise left inarticulate.”
You can listen to Canadian composer Emily Doolittle’s music Migrations based on my poem of the same name.
the signs have
fallen and only
the frames
remain: they
contain within
their limits
the sea and sky
and an occasional
snail: missing is the
warning about
cliff edges
From Dust Blown Side of the Journey (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017)
two strangers in the city forest
stand watching grey herons
three in a row in the cool shade
slowly the birds are forgotten
as one man swears refugees are lowering
his pension and the other says
softly he’s a human rights lawyer:
one man’s right wing and the other
left: two metal wings land
in a field of wildflowers
in eastern Ukraine and coal miners search
for fragments of
what was briefly
known as flight:
our human
remains. rebels
rush to hide
the evidence. why
do we shoot the flight
of our dreams from the sky?
a Bali guide book rests
beneath a sunflower.
no bird flies
with only one wing
from Dust Blown Side of the Journey forthcoming April 2017 (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
“Words, imprecise, time-bound as they are, construct remembrance and articulate futurity. Hope is the future tense.” — George Steiner The Poetry of Thought
In 1938 Auden wrote:
“The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient: I hope not.
I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all totalitarian theories of the State, from Plato’s downwards, have deeply mistrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbours start talking.” — From The Later Auden by Edward Mendelson
“There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere.” — Jan Morris
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” —Leonard Cohen
