I wish that Robert Kroetsch had been a friend of mine. He was a virtual mentor, a writer whose talent I adored from afar. I was lucky enough to visit with him numerous times over the years, at readings or launches or those lovely, boozy post-poetry parties that are iconic of the writing world, it […]
“All language is a longing for home,” claimed the 13th century Persian poet Rumi. Although our own writing is influenced by our musings on “home and away,” Angela and I hoped the theme would inspire the gifted poets of Alberta too. If we can gauge it by the deluge of submissions to this anthology project, […]
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bluer than his blind eye
is the letter my Opa
holds in his enormous hands,
my mother’s pen
has tattooed the frail paper
with this month’s
immigration stories,
cheery bravado disguises
her endless dismay
at Canada’s unforgiving climate,
the cabin’s rough boards
forever leaving splinters
in her dancer’s feet.
memory clear as
a new marble, I can see him
slouched on his end of the couch
his good suit immaculate,
the […]
after we immigrated,
Holland and its tangle
of noisy, loving relatives
ceased to exist.
in my preschool mind
the plane had rocketed
us through space and home
had spun away endlessly
lost somewhere between
Greenland and the stars.
except for Opa’s warm ghost
who recited poetry to me
in each new bedroom
long after my parents slept,
my grandparents’ voices
vanished, their faces blurred.
only at Christmas
when my mother’s face
glowed in […]
Walking the puppy amid the ruins
of another long winter, lawns sepia with mould,
the snow dying without grace, gumbo on my heels,
the dog is happy, her tail a flag of joy
but I curse this exile north of 55
and the circumpolar wind, ugly as seal breath,
that haunts a landscape unfit for anyone
but skittish trappers or a priest
on […]
