Wednesday Poems

Image:  Fiddler in a Blue Fedora, acrylic on canvas, 24” x18”

Just one of the many things I love about living on S,DÁYES (Pender Island) is the many marvellous concerts we get to enjoy.  Ptarmigan Arts, Stoney Pocket, the Concert Society and others support performances by both local and off-island musicians. Last Sunday, Island Chamber Winds, conducted by the island’s own Ben Litzcke, treated the audience to music from the 1800s to today, much of it unique and rarely performed.  There were two French horns, two oboes, two bassoons and two clarinets, and oh, those instruments sounded fabulous together! Next week we get to enjoy Tom Allen narrate a chamber musical, J.S. Bach’s Long Walk in the Snow, telling the little known story about the young Bach’s “400 km odyssey”.

I’ve often wished I were a musician. And though I did learn to play the piano and guitar at a very basic level, the art of it never came naturally to me and, despite my best intentions starting out, eventually I gave up on both.  So today, my Wednesday poem for this week is Strum the Guitar, from T’ai Chi Variations in Suddenly, So Much (Exile).

Strum the Guitar

All your life you've tried
to synchronize fingers and string,

a fascination that began
tangled in laces and cats' cradles,

the imagined music in a mute guitar
on a cottage wall —

begging your uncle to play,
though an inkling that he'd forgotten

how, crept between his evasions
like betrayal.  Years later

you spent hours with the gift
your mother could not afford,

feeling your way into the rhythms
of protest and love.  Now you reach

a moment in this sequence
where you can break an opponent's arm

or waltz with what your own two hands
have abandoned, hold

the hope of harmony
in your arms again.