First published in 2017; tis the season to repost. Joy in the Journey* is one of the themes of Advent, which is a central part of the Catholic religion, to which my mom was faithful. For me, that thought always takes me back to a dark country road, under a green and white blanket, under…
Tag: relationships
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…
Do Not Send
Do not send the poets to build your mighty streets for we will follow stream’s meander and bend aside for the cities of ants. Do not send the poets to clean your house for we are apt to pause, enraptured by the fall of dust through light, and sing ‘o, there am i, o there…
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…
Call and Response:O Open Heart
How To Hold You Now there is no way, actually to repay uncounted courage there is no way to say what lines the heart there are no swans no thrumming wings write the sky full that road carries no sign Overboard Li Po had no truck with suffering for art they say, when he fell…
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.
Morning
Originally posted on Prairiepomes:
Joy comes in the morning. – Psalm 30:5 Morning was always Mom’s time. In the winter on the farm, morning would begin with the sound of her rattling the kitchen stove, stoking up the fire. We heated the house via a mixed-fuel furnace in the basement, whom, for reasons that live…
A Constellation of Support
Today seems a good day to post this little article from 2015. A Constellation of Support It was a rare pleasure to meet the various people I interviewed for this, and I came away feeling uplifted. The thing is, nobody does anything in this world without support, whether we see and acknowledge it or not….
Being Here Now, Part One
Long ago, in Mexico, I lived by myself for the first time in my life. All alone, in a traditional Mexican house, which closes firmly to the street, but opens into a courtyard, which ends at a rough stone wall, shared by several neighbourhood houses. I’d lived in that town for about half a year,…
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…
Shimmer
Who remembers, jingles with the buzz; if you hear 1981, do you see those small tables? jostled round by young sophisticates, and here, one northern bush kid, easy tan of metis (years before capital M and definitions that don’t matter in the shimmer of the music). This girl is 16, down in The City to visit her sister…
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…
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