SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
The sun gave our shoulder blades ulu-shaped burns, and the sun gives nothing to our sort
I sleep now, and furiously
Clouds excreted shadows on the shoreline, and there were no clouds
You can't be an NDN person in today's world
and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature
poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature — hate its guts
once i left turtle island and i
rejoined la and doubleU and see
to savai‘i on a hunting trip
on the fairy from upolu
la picked up a day trick
blew him during lunch
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
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
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…
the spirit of
your flowers is
my favourite shelter
Blue-white afternoon. The Bow river churns and smokes
as the city rumbles, economy chokes and bundled homeless
build cardboard homes in the snow. Yes, Walt, this is the new
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which…
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
My Black heroes don’t drop names like Fendi Gucchi Prada
My Black sheroes rock afros like Angela Davis and Assata
But my sheroes are more than a trend and they’re bigger than a hairstyle
Blousy guitar I don’t want to count the beats Hey Hey
My pen I have bed hair in the best way Daughter
of sunlight and air and I’m glad you were born
It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy
To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps
All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue
And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea
I can manage being alone,
can pace out convivial hope
across my managing ground.
Someone might call, later.
What do the dead make of us
that we’d flay ourselves trying
The place, the question, the question.
The place, the interest, the question.
There is the place.
There is what you do in the place.
There is your belief.
— say the names say the names
and listen to yourself
an echo in the mountains
Tulameen Tulameen
say them like your soul
was listening and overhearing
and you dreamed you dreamed
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.
As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
A thousand martyrs I have made,
All sacrific’d to my desire;
A thousand beauties have betray’d,
with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki
your mouth will be the web
catching apihkêsis words,
Down a long, long corridor
I keep walking…
—A window straight ahead so bright it hurts the eyes,
Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid
the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf
might see it all as too hesitant for truth
yesterday at the Oakland zoo
I was walking alone for a moment
past the enclosure holding the sun bear
Queen and King, they rule side by side
in golden thrones above the clouds.
Her giggle and wide eyes remind him
GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /
yes / I do vaguely
/ you never liked
Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,
and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still,
like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more
60s pulled us from starvation into government jobs
antiquated Indians in Saskatchewan danced for rain
Manitoba Indian doings were hidden for a jealous
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
I’ve heard the phrase between you
and me too many times to believe
it to be true, but between me and you
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
Constantly risking absurdity
…
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
The sky, lit up like a question or
an applause meter, is beautiful
like everything else today: the leaves
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!
How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!
For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,
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,
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
