Blog - Wednesday Poems

Image:  Storm Warning is part of my Living With Cancer series.  I painted it after my first biopsy came back positive for breast cancer. (A later biopsy found the cancer was stage 4.)

Fifteen years ago today, I lost one of my closest friends to cancer.  Ann Sullivan and I met while working for our union, Local 2 of the Association of University and College Employees at Simon Fraser University.  Ann, her partner Arn, my husband and I spent a lot of time together over the years and it was through them that Bill and I  found our way to Pender Island.   A few months after Ann died, I lost another friend, Star Rosenthal - also a union pal - to cancer.  

I have been thinking of Ann and Star a lot lately.  How each handled her experience with cancer, and how being with them while they went through it has helped me, all these years later, deal with my own diagnosis.  So today's Wednesday Poem is Diagnosis, the one I wrote in their honour a couple of years after they died.  

 

Diagnosis

 

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes     

—e. e. cummings

 

What shall we say to Death
with Yes defeated by No
and only the winter of loving left
only the snow?                              

—Al Purdy (“Questions”)

 

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for leaf-mulch and garden-thaw
spiked with lily beginnings, for their wrap-
around skirts unfurling a fragrant sashay,
for bird-song surround in thrush-
colourful shade… While this sap-singing
uprising-everywhere spring rides in,
what shall we say to Death?

For the leaping greenly spirits of trees
are at it again, wind-waving away as gum-
booted slicker-dressed we yank weeds
plant spinach plant peas, hope for the best
from this golden-crowned sparrow-full
ground all bird-scratch and peck, knowing
even a well-tended garden is filled
with Yes defeated by No

and a blue-true dream of sky and everything
vivacious (o Flicker o Downy your drill-drumming
rat-a-tat-tatting all-day-denting metal
reminder: o sustenance o noise). When
after-bloom and wilt come along shock-
sudden with never we’re-ready-for-it news
we give in we protest until we have
only the winter of loving left –

which is natural which is infinite which is yes
to black-and-white dazzle, its every-
colour-under-the-sun-in-our-eyes shimmer;
yes to the unexpected in less, to first
flake-fall and last, to whatever is next yes
even thanks to the meantime of blizzard
and drift. Yes to what is, after all
only snow.

 

Diagnosis belongs to the glosa family, a form popularised in Canada after P.K. Page published her collection of glosas, Hologram (Brick Books), in 1994.  The traditional form borrows four consecutive lines from another poet, then uses them, in the same order, as the last line of four ten-line stanzas.  The lines are ten syllables each and lines six, nine and ten rhyme.

My poem is a double glosa, which means I chose to borrow two sets of four lines from two different poets.  The lines from e. e. cummings are the first line of each of my stanzas and those from Al Purdy are the last.  I decided to make the stanzas eight lines instead of ten, and as is often the case, I ignored the rhyme scheme and sylllable count.

Kate Braid and I discuss the glosa in more detail, along with poems that follow the form closely as well as poems that vary it, in In Fine Form, A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Caitlin Press).