It’s not our fault you feel bad. You should. We should. It’s dead children. We can all do better now.
Author: prairiepomes
Writer, gardener, hopeful curmudgeon, free-range Aboriginal, lover of life, Poet Laureate of Edmonton 2011-13, traveller, Fifth World Drummer.
Words made Song: another collaboration
Canadian composer Mari Alice Conrad’s latest piece, The Peculiar Dances of Shifting Minds, inspired in part by this poem of mine which honours my late mother. Also on the program, new works by composers Athena Loredo and Alice Ping Yee Ho; all performed by Vancouver’s Allegra Chamber Orchestra, under the leadership of Janna Sailor. Congratulations…
To Russia, with Love (of Books)
Well, today has opened with an amazing experience. I presented a talk at The Makushin Readings. http://www.spsl.nsc.ru/ Our topic: What is the role of Books as carriers of culture in our globalized, digital world? To summarize my answer: Books set down the limits of the known, and point at the possible. As well, by what…
Day 27: when day and night is a short story
To define a nameless haunting: what would you call the feeling of loss, on finding out only now, a grandpa’s span later, about ‘a skeleton of my granny’? To learn a thing that, as a child of the seventies, passed by: how people wanted rock and roll so much, that lacking vinyl platters, they recorded…
Day 22: Crayons and Other Fictions, or Metonymy of Mangoes
Those were the Tang-bright 70s, the Revello days knees grazed, skies so high and hazy with bonfire smoke – Who was that kid? the one who stuck things up his nose and roasted his wieners with the plastic skins still on just to see them shrivel. They were summer people dragged West with grandparents until…
Day 19: Constant/Transient/Permanent
from the bee wing to the soul comes a thrum, at once low and above the mind line, fine and high, lime-bright tingle of song, shimmer on the lake of attention breath of trees, yellow from the pine arms to the sun a cloud rolls: that’s my love of a season, windborne marked by fragrant…
Day 16: Dystopic Diagram
O thou dystopic diagram of shadows wherein we see the frame of us and hunt the breakage. Where wert thou hidden, method and artifact, before she birthed and named you? On the precise edge of language changing from reverent cases and declensions to scientific lists, and as if to mark that cross-road between French élan…
Day 15: Archeology of a Last Nerve
pull the trigger breach the dam bury the evidence we have the means, the stories, the blind need to misconstrue through archeology anything at all, create an arc of time and culture or an ark divine, in whose boots to tremble heebie-jeebie monkeys that we are. drop the rock breach the dame blaze on past…
Day 14: Circumference
‘Ashley is a circumference’ scrawled in chalk we giggled, i wondered who was bold enough to taunt him; also how typical, how yokel our 45 pupil school on the edge of nothing clearly, the wag had no idea what he or she was writing. Turning it over in my mind now Is Ashley a circumference?…
Day 13: Ambiguous Sunrise
on the one hand, birds scratch shadows across blue their lemon-lit bellies head townward, thus it must be time to rise and open silk o, sleepyheaded spiders, prod the root, let rhizomes ring out the call to arms of grass unless the hunchbacked northeast thunder clears his tarry throat again and spits out snow. you…
Day 12: Anticipation
i. open the door of the house envisioned you will fall through the floor you didn’t think to dream necessary, and below that, the basement never featured in fantasies. what we build, so much more than what appears. ii. dreaming of my old house reveals how i am tangled in the leap, and the net…
Day 11: tomorrow today
tomorrow i will know you curled into the future over the hurdle of midnight down through the blue hours singing kep’nmite to a new sun today, another blow tomorrow, you will understand the threadbare love you tug around your shoulders a net more than a shield today, another beneficent cigarette tomorrow, you will go down…
