Come October, Alberta Litfest will host the launch of Beyond the Foodcourt, a wonderful new anthology from Laberinto Press, a bold new venture dedicated to publishing work that features writers from what are often considered ‘minority language’ backgrounds – that is to say, representing the plurality of cultures that make Canada an amazing microcosm of…
Author: prairiepomes
Writer, gardener, hopeful curmudgeon, free-range Aboriginal, lover of life, Poet Laureate of Edmonton 2011-13, traveller, Fifth World Drummer.
Beginning and Beginning and Beginning
Originally posted on Prairiepomes:
? Today, they took the statue down in Kjipuktuk, or Halifax town in Mi’kmaki, mapped as Nova Scotia along the stormy Atlantic Ocean ? Where did it begin? This need to raise up monuments to men who call for deaths of other men and women and children and ways and lay a…
Legend…
Every town has its legends. Back in 2017, The Yards published a little article I wrote about one. Image by Janka00Simka0 on the legendary pixabay.com
ARC!
What a thrill to hold an Advance Reading Copy of my first novel. What a thrill as well, to have such great advance feedback from amazing writers: A riotous mystery set in a mystical city, Humane takes us on a mind-bending journey through Indigenous culture to find love and justice in places we never thought…
My Mother’s Ghost Knits a Scarf of Chain
Originally posted on O at the Edges:
? My Mother’s Ghost Knits a Scarf of Chain When I look up rust scabs flutter from your clicking needles, subsuming even the brightest link in this moon-drenched room. Communion’s possibility perished in that wicker basket, and we hold close our secrets, looped within circles, joined in these…
The Grove in the Night
It was night in Kyoto. In a grove on a mountain, in July 1995, as I was preparing to leave Japan, I received one of the great gifts of my life. It began with the Kyoto Connection, an international arts gathering. Over several months, I’d taken the stage at the Connection in various guises: as…
Late June Garden
Gratitude for the lilac white petunias tiny papyrus the boxes of garden, off-square the potato bathtub these hillbilly choices, my higgledy carpentry and green life that says yes nonetheless gratitude for the patio this ache in my back from the building of it that pile of bricks for the path yet to lay these eye…
Camino Edmonton Day 5:Implicated
It is not complicated: one foot and then another, swing along find your pace, and good companions under bright sun, the stories unravel each turn in the path reminding one then another of us of some song some place, and the way the world lies river, cradled ever more gently sweeps toward her namesake land…
Camino Edmonton Day 4: depths
In their black in dark hours, grandmothers crawl up the Way of the Cross, proclaiming by this deed, the immutable glory to come above Ajijic, knees raw, backs craggy, grandmothers and mountains bathe in Easter sunrise. Where the body shivers and aches, the spirit must step in. Where language and history differ, there too, spirit….
Camino Edmonton Day 3: the long curve (Solstice)
we trace the long curve rise and fall, shuffle uphill praising kinesiology painkillers, gumption who owns these ways? those teenage magpies underwear unpreened who try out strut and the sharpening of beaks perhaps broad poplars blanketing june in white cotton of tomorrow’s promise or the new comer family renting first bikes, unsure about english signage…
Camino Edmonton Day 2: Crossing
whitemud winds down brown and peaty, and on the boardwalk through willow breaks squirrel on a handrail, happy to eat offerings but quick to leap away – there is a line. below fort edmonton, in the forest, we discuss old names, dark histories how to teach and learn past potholes slippery with falling how to…
June 19, Camino Edmonton Day 1: Soft
Today was the first day of the Camino Edmonton, a light-hearted 5-day walk through our river valley via the network of pedestrian and multi-use trails available. I’m writing more indepth about it for a forthcoming magazine article, but thought I’d endeavour to capture each day in a poem. Day 1: Soft sand underfoot cleft between…
