Survivors

Lac Megantic – 10 years on

Lac Megantic
ten years on

Fire on the water, the waves ablaze,
and the sound, a monster, indestructible,
a dragon descending, breathing fire,
so swift, so powerful, come sudden
from nowhere, yet another disaster,
one of the many that torment us
now and then with its ravage and roar.

It refused to move on until sated – but
who could satisfy the monster’s hunger,
destroy its will, defeat its power?
Not us with our pitiful sacrifices,
homes, friends, family, devoured.

In spite of our efforts to rebuild,
nothing can ever be the same.
Ten years later, memories, grief,
and our tears are all that remain.
Yes, it has left, but what can we do
to stop it, if, and when, it comes again?


Comment: I wrote this poem on July 6, 2023, while listening to the CBC radio commentary on the tenth anniversary of the Lac Megantic disaster. A terrible event, it still haunts so many people, and yes, the fears, tears, grief, and memories linger on. How could they not?

Painting – Poppies – by Clare Moore.

Magician

Magician

I stand on a tiny platform, high above
the upturned faces of the clamouring crowd.
Before me, the high-wire stretches across
the diameter of the circus tent.

Clad in the enormous shoes of a clumsy clown,
I grip the wire with the toes of one foot.
Now I must choose – umbrella or pole?

The spotlight outlines my face’s whiteness,
the bulbous nose, the fixed, painted smile.
My jaws clamp tight in concentration.

Clutching the brolly, a good old gamp, I walk
the thin wire plank of my current destiny.
One step, two steps, tickle you under the chin,
and I pretend to fall, grasp the wire, and raised
by the crowd’s gasp of despair, swing back up.

Then, a yard from the finish line, I swallow dive,
turn a somersault in the air, and land on my back
in the middle of the safety net as the crowd goes wild.

“The magician works on the threshold that runs between light and dark, visible and invisible.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 145.

“The most difficult role in the play is that of the fool – for he who would play the fool must never be one.” Don Quixote.

Painting: Fire Sky by Moo.

Time and Tide

Time and Tide

Sitting, waiting, patiently,
it’s all I have left, except
for impatience and anger.
They sometimes take control
in an explosion of bitterness.

I can only sit here for so long and
then anguish gets the better of me.
A dropped plate, a spilt glass,
a cup of coffee slithering over
the tablecloth, and I explode.

Such events are becoming
more frequent and much fiercer.
I try to withstand them, to hold them
back, but they rise like the tide
that lifts the Fundy fishing boats
from their beds in the mud,
moon tides, planetary upheavals,
that swell again in spring and fall.

Like the boats in the bay,
I am powerless to stop them.

Two Spiders

Two Spiders

A spider dangles from its web by a fine, thin thread
that glistens in the sunlight. She hangs there, refusing
to think about the father she never knew, the aunties,
uncles, grand-parents, sisters and step-sisters, and all
those unknown relatives that abandoned her and fled.

What can she do? What can we do? Nothing.
We think ‘ancestry’ but we know, more or less,
who we are and what we are. We are just a son
and a daughter of troubled marriages where one set
got divorced and the other stayed together through
hell and high water, and all that those things mean.

But we are a son and a daughter, brought together
by chance, circumstance, happenstance, or some
thing beyond our control, and happy together,
the outside world shut out, and us in our little web,
as we have been for more than sixty years.

We have learned that, when the strong winds blow,
we must weave our web beneath fine grasses, that
do not stand strong like the oak tree, then stubbornly
break and fall, but bend like reeds or willows, before
the life’s storms, then straightening up, to raise
their heads, and surviving, after the winds pass.

A Darker Mist

A Darker Mist

Sometimes a dark mist marches over
the sea-salt marsh flats and, a sea-bird
come to land, nests in my heart. This lone
bird brings others and soon a colony sings
its chorus in time with the incoming tide
that threatens to overwhelm me.

My body’s weak clay responds to this
darkness and slips into the chaotic
cacophony of multiple voices
raised to shut me off from the light.

My soul, a seagull seeking the sun,
rises upwards, ever upwards,
in search of the sunshine, that silver
lining that redeems every cloud, belying
the darkness of this gathering gloom.

“You will find sorrow moving through you, like a dark mist over landscape.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 94.

Black Paintings

Black Paintings
pinturas negras
Goya

Wrapped in his blanket of silence, the painter paints.
He pays no attention to the shrieks, screams, prayers,
curses, doesn’t even hear them. He sees their staring eyes
as the bull’s eyes at which anonymous soldiers, heads down,
backs to his easel, fire. He sees their mouths as black holes,
slashed across their faces. He sees the priest with his rosary,
but never hears the rattle of the beads or the firing squad’s guns
going off, filling the canvas with smoke, the square with blood.

Back home, in the Quinta del Sordo, his deaf man’s house,
he sits at the supper table, dwarfed by his painting of Saturn,
devouring one of his children. Beside him, old women,
hags themselves, suck soup silently from wooden spoons,
or fly soundless, black bats in the starless sky,
 on the back of goats or on their witches’ brooms.

The great, open wounds of his paintings speak to us
of his hushed suffering, of the calamitous world that spawned
such violence, plague, famine, and fear. Plundering armies,
guerrilla warfare in back street and alley, torture, pillage,
rape, and suffering, pits filled with the dead and dying,
famine walking the streets, and all of it inaudible,
the nightmares of a little child, seen, but never heard.
His paintings speak to us, and they allow us to reconstruct
in our imagination, the many things that the painter, deaf,
but never dumb, could never hear, yet reproduced
using his paintbrush and his taciturn palette as a tongue.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

“It is said that deafness is worse than blindness because you are isolated in an inner world of terrible silence.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 71.

The Appointment

The Appointment

“We have room tomorrow,” she said.
“But only between 7 and 9 am.
Shall I book you in for 8:15?”
“Sure,” I replied, not realizing
that I had forgotten to remember
the joys of rush hour traffic,
and the crush of crossing
the only bridge downtown.

I left home early only to find
chaos at the end of my road.
School busses, cars nose to tail,
trucks, cyclists, you name it,
it was all there, flowing, slow
but steady, with scarcely room
to insert a razor blade between
bumper and bumper. But that
was only the beginning.

The bridge downtown: it was
like threading a four wheeled camel
through the eye of a very small needle.
Crawlers, creepers, slugs and snails,
racing demons, speedsters, all of them
hustling, impatient, bustling, yielding
not an inch of space. My car became
a shuttle, weaving a thread of progress,
inch by inch, through the maze
that confronted and confounded.

I got to my journey’s end at last.
“You’re late,” said the girl at reception.
“You’ve missed your appointment.
Shall I book you in again?
Tomorrow at the same time?”

Click here for Roger’s reading.

Black Saturday

Black Saturday

Doubt and Despair

1

This is the day we go into ourselves
to work out who we really are.

It is the teeter-totter day
when the world balances on a knife-edge:
Yesterday, the dark deed was done.
Today the body is in the morgue,
far from the crime scene
where black and yellow ticker-tapes,
keep sight-seers seeking thrills at bay.

Today, there is no centre to hold.
Things gyre and gimble in the wake
of troubling scenes misinterpreted,
called fake, and deliberately misunderstood.

The unfortunate lie chained so they can’t
escape. Take these chains from our hearts,
the watchers say. Take these irons from
our wrists, your knees from our necks.
Forsake your vicious choke holds.
Go away and leave us alone.

2

A birch tree lies on my power lines,
and I am powerless.

No phone, no radio, no tv,
and all because of a snow-laden tree.
Why did this happen to me?

“It’s a day, man, a day.
It’s nothing but a day.”
“Imagine,” says my wife, “being
without power all your life.”

I clench my fist and pump the air.
Nobody sees me. No one seems to care.

A ghost’s voice echoes in my head:
“Stop moaning, bro,
at least you ain’t dead.”

Sun, wind, melting snow.
The lame tree rising, slow.
Then, at last, the lines are free.
Power is back again.
I breathe more easily.

3

For forty days
I have wandered in this wilderness,
walking from room to room,
climbing stairs,
descending to the basement,
sitting at the computer,
sitting at the table,
writing in my journal.

I have watched the minutes
as they turn into hours,
the hours turning into days,
days into weeks, then months.

How long, I ask, oh lord, how long
before peace and love, friendship and joy,
return to this world
where they used to belong?

4

A turkey-vulture flew
over the house this afternoon,
hungering for who knows what,
as I too hunger for things
I have forgotten
and no longer know.

Freedom to walk
in now forbidden places,
freedom to shop for groceries,
to stop at the liquor store,
to buy wine and beer,
other things that I adore.

For forty days
I have sailed in this Noah’s
Ark of a house.
Like John the Baptist
I have lingered here for forty days.

Strange and wonderful are thy ways,
oh lord, in heaven, where souls and angels
admire your beauty and sing your praise.

Good Friday

Good Friday

Crucifixion and Death

1

Now is the hour of his parting,
such sweet sorrow, they say,
but not on this day.
Yet we’ll meet again, sang Vera Lynn,
don’t know where, don’t know when.

There he lies, helpless, on the street.
Why is that man in blue
kneeling on his neck?
“I can’t breathe.”
Can’t anyone hear his cries?
Is there anybody out there listening?

Watchers stand round and watch.
Someone makes a video on a cell phone.

Who gifted him this gift,
this parting gift he never chose.
Everyone who follows him
and tries to walk in his shoes
knows he had no choice.
They know he didn’t choose.

2

Do you feel the baton stab into the guts?
The plastic shield’s edge slash into the face?
The knee come up, no ifs, no buts?

Eyes water from tear gas and pepper spray.
Thunder flashes crack and roll, deafening
ears, taking years from marchers’ lives.

Did you follow him through Jerusalem?
Did you walk in his footsteps, step by step?
There is a green hill far away, or so they say.

The cameras rolled as they cuffed him
to his pavement cross, men in blue smiled,
winked at each other, watched him fade.

His loss was not their family’s loss.
Just another loser tossed beneath the bus.
The watchers watched and nobody made a fuss.

They stood and stared and nobody cared
until cell phone videos hit the tv screens.
 Now it’s fake news, whatever that means.

The believers will believe what they’re told.
You can’t put a price on what he was losing,
on the many things that others have already lost.

3

Leg-irons and chains:
that’s what remains from his journey here.

Iron, cold iron, splintered, burning wood.
A death bed on the sidewalk
his last will and testament.

A flaming cross lifted him to the skies,
that cross burning before his eyes.

Before he goes, we must double-check:
whose is that knee upon his neck?

“Let me breathe, let me breathe.
Take away your knee.
Justice, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Commissioner, forgive them.
They didn’t know what they did,
when all around the dying man
men closed their eyes and ears,
buried their heads, and hid.

4

Good Friday in Island View:
a foot of snow fills the streets,
empties the churches.
The Easter Weekend lurches
towards its predestined end.

But how do you end
two thousand years of hurt,
four hundred years of persecution,
of cruelty and neglect?

How do you end
eight minutes and forty-six seconds,
with that black man lying there,
choking, a white man’s knee on his neck.

He died in the shade
of orders that were given and obeyed,
orders that should never have been made.

Anonymity

Anonymity

Multiple masks stripped away, old wall paper
shed in strips, layer by layer, until you reveal
the bedrock foundations of your delicate face.

Your visage dissolves before my eyes until you
become what you were when I first met you:
sweet, young, fresh, a delight to catch the eye.

As you still are, to these old, fragile eyes of mine,
cataracts removed and lenses still capable of
seeing you in your spring, although it is your winter.

The snowfall of your hair cannot deny the sparkle
in your eyes, the summer freckles that will soon return,
the sunlight and joy you bring when you enter the room.

Ageing, yes, but you are as young and as sweet
as you always were. How could you not be?
Anonymity peels itself away until no barriers exist

between what you are to me now, and what you were.
It is a lie, that only the young write poetry in praise
of their beloved’s eyebrow, her lips, her gaze.

For how many days have we stood together, as one,
breathing the same air, walking together, facing
the same difficulties, and overcoming them hand in hand?

Yes, we have both slowed down – the way of all flesh –
and we are no different. We wither and perish, but
we haven’t perished yet, although we are withering.

The magic of our love, our gifts, molded into our DNA,
will not perish with us, and never will, not while
our spirits live on and our love creates others in our shape.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

“In the human face, the anonymity of the universe becomes intimate.” John O’Donohue, Cara Anam, p. 37.