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Image:  Options, oil on canvas, 24” x 24”

Over the past weeks and months, as I tuned in to election campaign reports that have been dominating our news, I was often reminded of a challenge of sorts that the late Governor General’s Award winning poet Steven Heighton tossed out to his fellow poets in 2011. At the time, he was promoting his latest books at a reading in Vancouver. Introducing his poem “Some Other Just Ones”, Steven explained that it was his response to Jorge Luis Borges’ poem “The Just”, in which Borges portrays a few ordinary people doing ordinary things and ends with the line, “These people, without knowing it, are saving the world” (Steven’s translation).  He then casually remarked that he assumed all poets would probably want to add to what Borges started.  When I got home that night, I re-read both poems and began to think about how I might contribute to the conversation.  For this week’s Wednesday poem, then, here is what I came up with:  More of the Just, another from my chapbook The Time Being.


More of the Just

Esas personas, que se ignoran, están salvando el mundo – Jorge Luis Borges


The mother who comforts the tearful child who bloodied her son’s nose.
The estranged friends who get over it.
The citizens of warring countries who refuse to take up arms.

The flash mob dancers.
The driver who screeches to a halt in the crosswalk and blanches.
The estranged friend who calls first and the one who gladly answers.

The teenager who shovels her elderly neighbour’s driveway, anonymously.
The publisher who chooses not to sell to the chains.
The driver who apologizes to the children he just missed.

The ham radio operator who keeps the Morse Code alive.
The husband who reads poetry to his ailing wife.
The publisher who sells, instead, to the staff and the staff, who form a co-op.

The sand artists.
The ones who walk down city streets smiling at strangers.
The husband who doesn’t get the poems, but reads them anyway, beautifully.

The father who teaches the winter sky to his neighbour’s kids.
The mother who comforts her bloodied son without laying blame.
The ones who stop and talk with street people.
The citizens of countries at war who march arm in arm for peace.


after Steven Heighton’s “Some Other Just Ones”


Both Borges and Heighton wrote list poems, so I wanted to do the same – but rather than use free verse as they did, I decided on a terzanelle.  Using (and slightly tweaking) the line repetition feature of this form, I could introduce some characters in one stanza, then revisit them later.  Other characters would be interspersed throughout, appearing just once in the unrepeated lines. My hope is that the form helps create a sense of movement, an ongoing goodness.  Given how this form works, I decided not to use Borges’ final line in my poem, as Heighton did in his, but instead used it as an epigraph.

Details about how this form works are provided in the Villanelle chapter of Kate Braid’s and my book, In Fine Form (Caitlin).