You remember the simple smell of dirt
driving winter roads to Fort McMurray
where malls are overweight with stuffed shoppers
who cannot consume enough in this new Eden.
As a child you burrowed deep into leaf rot
and worm tunnel, inhaled darkness of badger and bone.
Paradise: earth, breath, sky above.
It was before you understood you were Eve, cast-out
into a world […]
Tonight, moth wings of snow
against the glass, black trees silent.
I’m thinking about everything that’s dormant
within us. How the frankness of first love
falls away into another world. Long ago,
with crouched hearts we crept above
the sound of parents’ sadness to your narrow room,
polished stones and arrow heads on the window sill.
Outside, the green of northern lights. shhhhh. […]
That summer wild raspberries flamed
on the banks of the Battle River
as we blinded through murky waters
searching for clams. The air smelled of eternity,
the summer promised a life bigger than a town.
Filling a bucket with dark rocks of shell
we conjured the palpable curve of the future:
you would pilot a plane so high
above the land the moon […]
The quiet gaze of bison,
mouths moving
over fescue
and milkweed,
sway of wind on throat latch
and bull’s beard.
Dark, ancient ghosts
shifting over the land.
On this bleached prairie
beyond the salt flats
of Sullivan Lake
the small light
of a torch
on a cave wall
at Lascaux
still gleams in their eyes.
~ Rosemary Griebel
Rosemary Griebel’s poems have been published in a variety of media including literary magazines, […]
