Poems

Sonnets from the Portuguese 24

Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,

Shut in upon itself and do no harm

In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,

And let us hear no sound of human strife

With the Dying of the Light

I recited to him,

                      Now as I was young and easy,

and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,

Comfort

11 am. Time to wake up.

Muscles sore, jaw clenched, warm light

scattering dreams of violence across

the bedroom. I've chosen a self

dont worry yr hair

              dont worry yr eyes

         dont worry yr brain man th snow is

Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure

“I saw my land in the morning

and O but she was fair”

- M.G. Smith, “Jamaica” (1938)

I

Come see my land

Come see my land

Bad Brown Girl

i can barely speak in my mother tongues stutter

my accent is bad

i hate jalebi

but i like aloo samosa

i'm a bad brown

girl i didn't join the

SAA or the ISA

i just didn't know

DNA

It is told and retold

of how Kohkum killed a bear with a river rock

an arm like Ronnie Lancaster (that old Saskatchewan 

Roughrider)

she throws with precision

My Brother at 3 A.M.

He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps

when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.

         O God, he said. O God.

Poem For Duncan Campbell Scott

Who is this black coat and tie?

Christian severity etched in the lines

he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man

who believes in work and mission. See

how he rises from the red velvet chair,

In Exile I Draw the Tower Card

When I injured my brain

it was barely spring.

Now it is mid-October

& getting up at eleven

is a big accomplishment.

Last month I counted

the five hundred extra

hours I’ve spent sleeping

Hall of Mirrors

To Kristin Lems

We miss something now

as we think about it

Ella Josephine Campbell

Slim, slight. Sinew and bird bones.

Cords of her hands like spruce roots.

Came from Ship Cove to Crow Gulch

with little more than the child inside her,

landed in a small shack flanked by

Little Song

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles 

Over a groove. The other slushes chords.

Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.

Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

Mother Church #3

KIN KLETSO/YELLOW HOUSE

CHACO CANYON, SAN JUAN COUNTY, NEW MEXICO

ANASAZI RUINS, AD 1125-1130

For Henri, at 2

In Praise of a Shadow

Source of echo

madman of prophecies

buffering nonsense

in absence of anything 

solid as cloud

flung

from the womb

pale pallid asteroid

belt of nanny goat

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,

The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;

Along the sea-sands damp and brown

The Tree

Fair tree! for thy delightful shade

’Tis just that some return be made;

Sure some return is due from me

Paying Attention

He is not doing well. She is not

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars tonight

But those of memory.

Yet how much room for memory there is

Confessions

What is he buzzing in my ears?

“Now that I come to die,

Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”

Dinosaur Economics

i wanted bitumen to be made of dead dinosaurs. why did i want these

ancient kin to be passively implicated in the fossil fuel industry? it

From Chapter I

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink

this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,

disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,

Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

War

In my body flows the blood of Gallic

Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle

ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,

Aliens Visit the Islands

There is no leader, so we take them to our women.

They say, "Oh, so you have finally joined the 

universe," and we reply, "Careful, there is one

nation still using Fahrenheit." To say that we 

From Verso 4

I was nine and I stood at the top of the street for no reason except to make the descent of the gentle incline toward my house where I lived with everyone and everything in the world, my sisters and my cousins were with me, we had our bookbags…

Ae Fond Kiss

Tune: Rory Dall’s Port

First printed in Johnson’s S.M.M., Vol. 4, 13th August 1792.

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;                          …

Happy Birthday Moon

Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.

Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.

He makes the Moon say something new every night

to his deaf son who slurs his speech.

The Windrush

Dem did sey she pregnance

Cum a sea full a mi

Weighing har down eena har shoe dem

Dresses, coco, mangoes an baggy an arl

Dem did sey de ship nearly sink

Mi mumma nebah sleep a wink

Self-Portrait in Siem Reap

The French chef says, Try the foie gras, it’s very good.

So I treat myself to the liver of a force-fed goose.

Give it to me on a crostini with black currant!

I have so many now.

I have so many now.

There’s one where we were giants, playing with our size by falling over

houses and trees, laughing.

There’s another where I was racing the old ones in a game, and we stopped

Holy Beings

on the day the chief of kâ-awâsis announces they have confirmed 751

bodies in unmarked graves outside the residential “school” in their

community, i google things like:

Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

Harmony with all of you

the task given to me when all

the ice had melted was to

welcome the sky people to

the river and to show them

how to fish and how to

build a fire to warm

themselves.

I moved on and came across

On Food/Bannock

baked, square or round globes formed from the rims of used pickle jars
i don't have milk, use water
i don't have eggs, that's okay, only some people use them anyways
i only have a bit of sugar, that's okay, throw it in

From World of Made and Unmade

In my dream my mother comes with me.

We are in the meadows we call

The Flats, walking the dogs.

Walk straight past the water trough,

she says, do not engage the moss.

the second time

i ask mama

about residential school

she says no

i ask her again

she says no

the third time

i stop listen

to her silence

Finis

Give me a few more hours to pass 

With the mellow flower ofthe elm-bough falling,

And then no more than the lonely grass

And the birds calling.

Give me a few more days to keep