from my patio i watch cranes and/or snow geese rehearse overhead. lower down, sparrows on manoeuvres, the odd chickadee. small engine plane finds its level up there somewhere. it’s all one the song, the sky bright strata. earthbound, i celebrate this spring’s exuberance, building by hand and eye a brickwork patio big enough to lay…
Tag: life
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…
On Land… Addendum: The Question that Matters
Addendum: This morning, I listened to the radio, and heard Greta Thunberg address the UN. Having lived through the Nuclear scare (notice nobody talks about all the armaments still out there, still as great a peril), and witnessed how people struggled for the ‘right’ title to attach to this crisis we must now fear, I…
Animate
you get to an age where you take up your space sink animal roots into animate places, move by instinct and discipline you choose, what to honour what to remember, what unravels in the wake you hold fast where you take up your space you choose the colours, mindful time shades and tints strike the…
The Silence Between Two Rivers
I call myself the Silence Between Two Rivers because I inherit two large streams of humanity. The stories of our interconnections are not well told, for the most part. And the pressure to choose one side or another of my identity is real. And tedious. And not nearly as interesting to me as the territory in between.
Ode to Allan R
Another perfect day. A great day for madcap rehearsals for the massive community theatre show. But was it the power or the water utility responsible? I don’t remember, and the people i’d ask are either dead or otherwise out of touch. Anyway, the town had no water. No water is no big deal as far…
Song of Praise (resung)
In Nass Valley, one shaft of sun lights two red and white toadstools in damp moss, luminous deeper in cathedral, wingéd ugly fungi, colours i wouldn’t admit there, i and all that i am, no less than the stinkhorn and oozing mud sing the brown and wrinkled, slick and loathsome, what i would not dare…
Beginning and Beginning and Beginning
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 bounty on our scalps…
New Leaders in a Very Old Town
Tonight, we have a new mayor in Edmonton. And i’m so happy, not least because he has thrice made reference to Indigenous roots. He had himself introduced by a volunteer from Treaty 6. He said, as if we all have long known and accepted this, “Edmonton is a very old place.” And he named honouring…
Prairiepomes 