Wednesday Poems

Image: Wild, acrylic on canvas, 20” x 16” (sold)

I was thinking that this Wednesday I might stay with last week’s ‘weeds in the city’ theme, when a nice surprise decided the matter for me. A few days ago I posted a sunset photo on Facebook, and poet Pam Galloway, who now lives in Manchester, commented on it, saying the sky she saw while driving the Sea to Sky highway was the same deep crimson. What?  Sea to Sky? That’s not in Manchester! It turned out Pam was visiting family in BC, and although this time we weren’t able to see each other in person, we did get a chance to have a good long chat on the phone. And I remembered that, some years ago when Pam was visiting Pender, she bought one of my paintings, the one shown here – which pairs nicely, I think, with my poem Wild and Unwieldy from Cedar Cottage Suite (Leaf Press), a glosa on lines by English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.


Wild and Unwieldy

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness?  Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Inversnaid”)


In ditches on fringes by boulevard and berm
where green on the verge of descent meets gurgle
and rush draining downward and down
flowering the flow of sorrel, dandelion,
buttercup tease, their runners and taproots inching
in from the edges until we take up trowel and digger,
dig deeply and deeper, up by the roots
what the world would be.  Once bereft

of thistle and burr, the prickle and burn of
the unwanted other, we’d miss them, rush off
with digger in hand to redefine wildflowers –
from ditch and berm we’d fetch them,
bring back to our gardens and hearts in the concrete
wilderness what we long to control but can’t
though we cultivate and cull, shovel and shove.  Let’s
let them be left.  O let them be left,

the chickweed and clover, to decorate lots we’ll leave
open for them; give foxtail its place
in sidewalks and patios to fill in the cracks
nobody mends; let henbit and Joe-Pye splatter
our streets with their feisty palette, a summer bouquet
over aquifers of a past still trickling beneath our feet
as we peer through barricades of rain in a mindset
of wet.  And wildness.  Wildness and wet

just past the back door, another bountiful feast
in brambles.  Punctured and drenched, we stand
purpled and bursting with the plump and the luscious …
There are harvests larger than we’re meant
to collect, like the wild and unwieldy thriving
in the midst of our densities to feed and protect
the feral and winged, their dens and their nests –
long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

P.K. Page describes the glosa as "... the opening quatrain written by another poet; followed by four ten-line stanzas, their concluding lines taken consecutively from the quatrain; their sixth and ninth lines rhyming with the borrowed tenth." (Hologram, A Book of Glosas, Brick Books).  Here, I’ve altered the form a bit, using eight-line stanzas instead of ten. As Hopkins’ lines are rhymed couplets, I didn’t set out to adapt my stanzas to the glosa rhyme scheme – yet wound up with some stanzas rhyming at the end anyway.