SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
the re-invention of oneself
through the tongues of whispering mountains
the re-arrangement of the universe
Here at Woodlands, Moriah,
these thirty-five years later,
still I could smell her fear.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,
And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,
And the skid-roads blind, and never a look
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
Backward & down into inbetween as Vicki says. Or as Robin teaches
the gap, from which all things emerge. A left
handed…
More than a storey high and twice that long,
it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,
possessed of the ecology of some …
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do…
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
For everyone
The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Titled gluttons dainties carving,
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying “weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe!
“Where are thy father and mother? say?”
