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Image:  Desire, archival digital print (manipulated photograph)

It's December and that means the season of festive lights has begun. The Butchart Gardens’ amazing Christmas Lights display has been turned on, and here on the small island where I live, as elsewhere, people are stringing lights on porches and trees to brighten these deep winter nights.  I love these lights, and thought I must have a poem about them somewhere – but no, it turns out I’ve never written one.  However, several decades ago, when we were both starting out as poets writing about work, my friend Kate Braid and I wrote companion poems inspired by the lights on Vancouver’s Geodesic Dome, built for Expo ’86.  So here they are, first Kate’s, then mine, responding to hers:


Union Welders: Overtime
- for Sandy Shreve

My brothers are building a dome
of crazed bars jutting
stiff into Expo air.

I watch them at night
hundreds of feet off the ground
magnificently poised
up where the air is clear.
As they work they are stars to me
shooting novas as they strike their arcs,
set welding rods
and build.

That’s not welders, my son explains
sixteen and wise.
Those are lights, set to flash.
Construction is finished,
done.

That night it is joyless to me.
I see builders no more,
just the built
ugly attempt
to mimic heaven.

─ from Covering Rough Ground by Kate Braid (Polestar), reprinted with permission
 

Night Lights on the Geodesic Dome
-  for Kate Braid

You mentioned the welder you imagined
working late into the night, how
the sparks you saw flying from a torch
held by hands still fondly binding triangles
kept you fascinated
until you realized the delicate
firefly dance
was only an erratic flashing of bulbs.

Construction of this sphere never
intrigued me.  It has always
looked cold, the metal more
like tinsel ribbed with acrylic
inexplicably curved to a finished glitter,
an irritating scrape
across my eyes.

This lattice of arched angles
seemed like sterile growth around a void ─
but last night, driving by

I think I saw your welder
dancing on the dome.

─ from The Speed of the Wheel Is Up to the Potter by Sandy Shreve (Quarry Press)

In addition to appearing in our first published books, these poems were published together in Canadian Dimension (June, 1988).