Here’s Toronto’s Exultate Choir performing a morning meditation of mine, set for choir by Mari Alice Conrad. Her setting received the Stephen Chatman Award for student composition this spring at Podium, Canada’s national choral symposium, when this video was recorded. Here’s the original post of At First Light, which I wrote in May 2020 as…
Category: 30/30 2 May 2020
Song for Space Travelers
One of my earliest memories: summer 1969, in the farmhouse kitchen with Mom radio talking about Moon Landing. Through the Tang years of the 70s, we’d play astronaut games, all of us kids home and schoolyard filled with the allure of space. We watched the space operas on TV, too thrilled at the prospect of…
May 28: View of a Pine
what do they call those? candles? that the pine lifts skyward still. she is winter-killed, red around her trunk, and cramped, encamped between two houses, not the forest she expected at my window as she rises, spring by spring she bears away any excuse for not trying. there is wind, there is sun, there is…
Meditation: Gold
do you miss the rain ancestors? or is that how you touch earth again? do you watch over one nest? or roam? spirit feet like seeds riding is that you singing in summer storms? do you remember? is that why spruce wears pollened buds? this gold as transient as breath. Image by lldigo via…
May 23: Heart
become accustomed to the weight memory lays across your heart lift it anyway become schooled in the crack and creak pain of rising one more time kneel anyway numb your skin to the lash every absence a thorn lean in somewhere in all this brush and scrub meaning and renewal send green tight curled leaves…
May 22: Certainty of Trees
Gratitude to the rain. Gratitude to the sky. Gratitude to the many tiny things. What are we supposed to do? Arise into cities, bloom and shed light? It’s true, I don’t think much about how my brothers live. There they stand, gnarled still offering softest green in faithful bargain, to the sky. Look how their…
Rainwashed
rainwashed morning sky could last until dusk all low smooth silver and smoke elm queen shakes out her tresses daughter plum shyly offers a branch blue black asphalt path, too, shines here, the cedar fence there, willow trellis peonies contemplate sun to come reach leaves glow yellow, red, burgundy forecasting and remembering fall even here,…
camping in search of bears
there was bear poop at the foot of the ravine just by the trail full of berry husks, intriguing to the dogs. there was a cougar on victoria park golf course just below downtown that could put a hole in one. there was a lynx at rest in the legislature grounds approving the shape of…
Prairiepomes 