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).

Above: Varied Thrush, manipulated digital photograph

Summertime is festival season all across the province, and that includes Pender Island.
Last weekend I had a table at Art in the Orchard, a fabulous one day event that showcases
a wide variety of artists and musicians.  And this coming weekend, Ptarmigan Arts’ annual
Mosaic Festival, featuring musicians, artisans and more, will move from its former Hope Bay
location to the Pines Forest behind the community hall. 

All this music and orchards and woodlands brought to mind my poem, Love
Song of the Varied Thrush, first published in my chapbook, Level Crossing (Alfred Gustav Press).

Love Song of the Varied Thrush

The thrushes are singing again. Sharps and flats
rise from the firs, then subside – as if the trees were filled
with minstrels tuning their instruments.
                                                                  Once a year,

the varied thrush brings back its woodland chant
pitched to unravel a world of heart-broken laments.

Incantations roam the woods, like lovers lost in a maze
of sharps and flats, rising
                                             and subsiding
with the firs waving their batons to the music.

This poem is a disguised triolet. Traditionally, a triolet features a rhyme and metre pattern,
but as usual, I largely disregarded those. The eight-line form also calls for two refrains:
lines 1, 4 and 7 are one; lines 2 and 8 are the other.  Here, the two short drop lines can be
considered part of lines 3 and 7 for the purposes of locating the refrains.  Though, visually,
they suggest a 10-line poem, which, along with the radically altered refrains, is part of the disguise.

For more about triolets, Kate Braid and I discuss them, with examples, in the Rondeau Family
chapter of In Fine Form, A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Caitlin Press).

Above: Elder, 7" x 5", framed archival digital photograph (sold); 

For quite some time now, friends and I have been bemoaning the state of our memories.  This past week has been another one of forgetfulness for me, topped off a few days ago by missing an important film I wanted to see.  We all know this is a normal part of the aging process, though we can't help but worry just a bit about dementia.  For most of us happily, so far, dementia is not the issue.  Thinking about this reminded me that one of the poems in my "Tai Chi Variations" sequence is on point.  So today, I'm posting "Needle at Sea Bottom" from my book Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions) (more about this sequence follows the poem).  

Below: Gone to Seed, 6" x 4" digital a photograph - one I sell as a birthday card - but only for folks with a sense of humour! 

Needle at Sea Bottom

In middle-age you begin 
to forget little things, lose them
like dropped stitches.  Just yesterday,
even the needle disappeared into the depths
where the misplaced wait 

to be retrieved.  Now you stroke the air 
as if you are crawling through water,
but the movement becomes a dive deep enough 
to touch bottom.

All the way down you peer into green
light, caress memories you have long wanted
back, gather them into your arms
until it is time to breathe again
and resurface, buoyantly
empty-handed

I began the Wednesday Poems blog last April with another poem from this sequence.  What I didn't mention then was how these poems came to be.  It was 1997, my third book had just been published and I was in that common but always disturbing space of wondering if I would ever again have anything to write about.  At the time I was in a wonderful group of women artists and writers (Sex, Death and Madness ). When I mentioned how I was feeling, Claire Kujundzic suggested I look for something new and different to do, something that would take my mind off worrying about what might come next for my writing.  It was the perfect suggestion.  I decided to follow in the footsteps of my mother and one of my closest friends, both of whom practiced and taught Tai Chi. I found a class at my local community centre and started in, with zero intention of writing poetry about it. I just wanted a new experience, a practice that would be good for body and soul.  But the minute our instructor began naming the poses, the writer in me was off and running. The names themselves were poetry:  which meant each week I came home after class inspired. And there began a wonderful cycle of learning Tai Chi movements, discovering their beautiful names, then spending the following days crafting the poems those names called up.

Above: Detail of reflected cattails and reeds taken in 2016 from the walkway in the Sackville Waterfowl Park, alongside the old railway bed that now forms part of the Trans Canada Trail.  Below: A small stretch of the railway where I played as a child – photo taken in 1980, before the rails were removed.

The other evening, friends were reminiscing over dinner about our childhood antics.  A few of us described a summer ritual of putting pennies on railroad tracks to see what shape they would take after the train ran them over. Then as I perused my Facebook feed the next morning, up popped a photo of wild strawberry jam, posted by a close friend of my sister's. That picture brought back memories of growing up in the Maritimes and especially the glorious scent of those berries filling the air as my sister and I picked them for our mother, who also turned them into a delicious jam.

These two events reminded me of what I think of as my quintessential summer /nostalgia poem.  It seems fitting to make this one of my July Wednesday Poems, so below is Wild Strawberries, from my book Belonging (Sono Nis Press). Though written in the third person, the ‘she’ in the poem is very much me.  Also, I should note that when I wrote it, I was experimenting with letting line breaks take the place of punctuation, following on something I’d read by Al Purdy about superfluous periods and commas etc.  Looking back, I’m not so sure the experiment was useful, and am always tempted to add punctuation at the ends of those lines.  But for now I’ll leave the poem as I wrote it. Oh – and a geographical note for those unfamiliar with the Maritimes:  The Tantramar marshes are on the Chignecto Isthmus around the Bay of Fundy, and are part of the traditional territories of the Mi’kmaq First Nations; the Northumberland Strait is the body of water between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on the one side and Prince Edward Island on the other.

Wild Strawberries

On this July morning, the Fundy breeze makes waves
on its distant bay
sends gusts like messengers to the marsh
where a young girl stands
still and silent, only her wild hair flying

These are the days when freight trains still speed
across the Tantramar to Cape Tormentine
She rolls the word, terminus, in her mouth
imagines the end of the line, the engine and every boxcar
rising into the sky, their bulk a weightless chain
with the will to glide high and soundless as clouds
above the blue Northumberland tides
Then come to ground at the edge of the Island
ease their wheels back onto beginnings
wherever the rails wait

the way she waits, now
for the rhythm of elsewhere
the click-clack of dreams
and for the call to Come Alo-o-ng, Come Alo-o-ng
an impossible song on a soft wind
that cups her face like the comfort
of her mother’s hands
on this hot day

The girl kneels, knows to put
her weight down slow on the stones
nudge out a blunt nest for her knees
She places her hand on the rail, feels only heat
no shudder
Leans low to listen, ear to steel
her brown eyes wide, watching, just to be safe

She adores the smell of rust and tar and it is
best this close to the track
but on this day the air is also sweet
her nose tingles with the idea of sliced strawberries
She lifts her head
centres her penny on the rail

sniffs at the air, transformed to her rabbit self
leaps across the tracks as if startled
though her flight follows a geography
of other summers, the knowledge of red, ripe
and speckled with the seeds of sunlight

The train rumbles toward her now
its destination west and one day she will follow
see the rest of the world for herself
but this is her place, already she is certain
she will return

What she cannot imagine is a future
when the last caboose will fade into the distance
forever, the rails here lifted from their beds
stacked and abandoned on some vacant lot
herself long gone

She picks up a penny, a good one today
heads home with the promise
of a new shape of copper shining in her hand
the shout of wild strawberries on her tongue

Image:  Things Fall Apart, 36" x 36", oil and cold wax on cradled wood panel.

Today, instead of posting one of my own poems, I thought I’d post a classic: The Second Coming, by W. B. Yeats, which in large part inspired the above painting.

For the past decade, this poem has haunted me.  History, it seems, is repeating itself, too often featuring the worst of human failings.  When Russia invaded Ukraine, I was experimenting with oil and cold wax on a large cradled wood panel. As I laid down layer after layer of disparate shapes tumbling through space, a line from that poem, “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” kept coming to mind. I soon realized I was painting the first phrase of that line. I still hope the second phrase might not come to pass, though since then the world seems to be slipping further into the abyss, with yet more unconscionable wars raging, a worsening climate crisis and the rise of the far right (though happily, the recent British and French elections held the latter at bay, at least for now).

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
 

- William Butler Yeats, 1920

My friend Donna Shanley recently introduced me to the world of flash fiction. Hers have been widely published and are marvellous. You can find one example here: https://crowcrosskeys.com/2024/05/15/tresses-donna-shanley/

Thinking about flash fiction reminded me that every now and then I’ve turned my pen toward prose poems, so I’ve decided to post one today:  Edith and Alba, from my book Belonging (Sono Nis Press).  This also reminds me that, even though Kate Braid and I discussed what prose poems might be in In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Form Poetry (Caitlin Press), I have never been entirely sure how to distinguish them from short prose.  So perhaps, after all, what I wrote was flash fiction?  And does it even matter?  Either way, the two women in the piece are real – Edith was my grandmother and Alba, my great aunt.  The visit depicted in this piece is obviously fiction, even a bit surreal – but many of the details are drawn from my memories of visiting them as a child.

Edith and Alba are shown with friends in the above photo, taken on July 10, 1937. Edith is third from the left and Alba is at the far right.

Edith and Alba

It is a late January afternoon and the sun, flicking a few last prisms across frozen snow, is yawning toward the horizon.  Two women sit in the living room, showered with a wide fan of light from the bay window, dropping in through blinds, slats angled like lowered eyelids.  Between them, the silver tea set glows on a glass topped coffee table.

Edith leans forward to pour.  Faint sounds of a distant ritual might be heard, a delicate clink as the pot is lifted from the tray, a quick splash and gurgle in each antique china cup, a prattle of spoons stirring, then placed upon their saucers.  Always on these occasions an aura of Earl Grey curls through the house on ghostly fingers, as if beckoning memories.  The women  –  careful to visit when the house they shared for nearly forty years is empty, as they do not come to haunt and have no wish to startle or frighten the young couple that lives here now – relax in ornate wing-backed chairs, sip their tea, and listen.

The walls let go of voices.  Alba hears the front doorbell chime.  A shy girl slides onto the piano stool, arranges her fingers over the keys, her saddle-shoed feet at the pedals.  The metronome ticks behind Beethoven's beautiful Fur Elise.  Edith's grandchildren hop from foot to foot in the front hallway, begging entry to the mothball closet under the staircase where wooden toys from another generation are stored way in the back, below plastic wrapped suits and sweaters.

Dusk casually descends around these two Victorian-born women, the one who married the other's brother, the other who remained a spinster.  They meet here when they can, taste the details of their lives.  Sometimes, like today, they arrive to laughter and song; other afternoons it might be an illness or even a death; as often as not it's just the ordinariness of any day, something as simple as a favourite breakfast — the rustle of the morning paper, the scrape of forks and knives against plates, the thick scent of sausages and eggs, toast or donuts or fresh baked bread. 

In shadow now, Edith reaches over, pats Alba's hand, the years of care between them so long ago grown soft with sagging skin.  Alba smiles, says nothing.  It never fails.  Between their visits, each conjures up these fleeting moments, imagines conversation.  But everything that they've saved up to say will take too many words to fit this tiny vessel of disappearing time they savour, sitting here, the darkened parlour brimming with their silence.

For this week’s Wednesday Poem, I’ve chosen another one from Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions). Today, A Cormorant also appears on one of my poetry postcards, alongside a photo I took at Trout Lake when I was living in Vancouver. (The story behind the poetry postcards is in my June 5 Wednesday Poem, Crows.)

My husband and I first started visiting Pender Island in the late 80s/early 90s. On one of our first visits, I came across a chapbook of Pender Island poetry. There, I found The Gift Shop, by Gudrun Wight, a two-stanza poem in which the lines in verse one are repeated in verse two, but in the opposite order. This was the first time I’d come across a poem written as a palindrome, which I usually thought of as a word or phrase spelled the same both ways (kayak; Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba).  I was just beginning to explore writing in various forms, and was drawn to those that featured lines repeated in a particular pattern – pantoums, villanelles and the like.  So this poem intrigued me.  How difficult would it be to write a poem to this structure and still have it make sense?  Not easy, I discovered.  Over the years I’ve managed to write only two palindromes that I felt succeeded. In today’s poem, I’ve used punctuation to alter the sense of some lines in each stanza, subtly shifting emphasis or meaning. I’ve also varied the form a wee bit, making it four stanzas instead of two, and in the second verse where the lines begin to appear in reverse order, I’ve inserted the poem’s title to smooth out the turn.

Some years ago, poet Kate Braid and I co-edited In Fine Form, A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Caitlin Press). Our chapter on the palindrome has a discussion of this form and more examples of how various poets have approached it.

With the first day of summer coming right up, I thought I’d post another poem from my book
Belonging (Sono Nis Press).  As a kid, a favourite early summer (and late spring) ritual was the 
search for a blade of grass wide enough that when positioned just so, you could blow into it and
make a harsh squawk. The longer you could make the sound last, the better.  That memory 
prompted me to write Improvisation.

Decades later, this poem along with some of my favourite jazz pieces, inspired a painting, Jazz,
the image shown above. In the past, I’ve written poems responding to paintings (a method
called ekphrasis) but this was the first time I’d responded the other way around. A few years later,
artist Annie Smith (https://anniesmith.ca/) taught me how to make accordion books, so I made
one, shown below, to go with this pair. For this book I photographed details from the painting
to fill the panels on one side, and printed stanzas of the poem for the reverse panels.

“One of the boys and I got out the guitar and mandolin and sat on #5 hatch outside focsle strumming away at them.  I made an awful noise but a picture Tim took of us looks as if I was actually playing!” – Jack Shreve, 1936

With Father’s Day coming up this weekend, I thought I’d post another poem from Waiting For the Albatross (Oolichan Books) – a collection of poems I crafted by quite liberally rearranging words, phrases and sentences I borrowed from a diary my dad wrote when he was 21 and working as a deck hand on a Canadian Steamships freighter during the Great Depression.  (For more about the book, see my May 1st Wednesday Poem at https://www.sandyshreve.ca/blog.)

In the photo here, dad is the one pretending to play the mandolin. And for those who might not know what a tin pan trappist is, here is how Jesse Selengut, of New York’s Tin Pan Band explained it to me in a 2011 email:  “In older music parlance, the drum set is oft referred to as the traps set. A trappist is probably a made up, clever word to describe a drummer. A tin pan trappist would mean someone who took out some pots and pans and made a make-shift drum kit for jamming on the boat.”

Today’s poem is a madrigal, a form invented by Chaucer in the 14th century, featuring among other things, three refrains (lines 1, 6 & 11; lines 2, 7 & 12; and lines 3 & 13, with which I’ve played fast and loose).

There have been too many funerals in my life lately. But they reminded me of my poem, “Crows”, from my book Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions). It feels right to make it this week’s Wednesday Poem, in part because of the story behind it. (The image here is another of the poetry postcards I talked about in my May 15 post.) Here’s an excerpt from my longer post about this poem, published in 2013, in Ooligan Books’ Alive at the Centre Where Poems Begin blog:

“Crows” began with a chance encounter on my way home from work one overcast February afternoon in 1998.  An older man walking ahead of me slowed to a saunter as I approached, as if waiting for me to catch up to him.  When I did, he peered at me from under his nondescript cap and pointed to a couple of vacant lots beside us, asking if I’d noticed there were more crows around than usual.  “Not really,” I confessed, looking at what seemed a rather normal number pecking at the ground.  Then he told me how hundreds upon hundreds had arrived earlier that day, covering the field, the trees, the street – and then took off, darkening the sky.  “I think they came for my neighbour,” he said, nodding at an old house across the way.  “She died last night.”  A little farther on, he explained that when we die, crows come to escort our souls to heaven; how he hoped, when the time came, they’d show him the way, too.  A few paces later, he turned off the path and I continued on my way.  But the man and his words stayed with me.

I’ve long been fond of crows.  Growing up in New Brunswick, I’d often wake to their boisterous heckling across the Tantramar Marsh.  Others were annoyed by the ‘noise’ but I heard the possibilities for a new day in those voices.  Yet I’d never written about them; at most, crows made a passing appearance in a few of my poems.  While I knew about and admired their intelligence, I’d never read up on what they might stand for in world cultures or religions.  Given what the man I’d met earlier in the day had said, I realized I needed to look into this, so I turned to one of my favourite reference books – Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (Harper and Rowe, 1988) – and read every crow entry.  From Walker I learned, among other things, that to the Roman ear the crow’s call sounded like their word for tomorrow – and so, to them, this bird was “a symbol of the future”.

With Walker’s information, my own enchantment with crows, their generally bad reputation (as messy, as loud, as bullies and thieves) and one man’s comment about crows and our souls, all at the back of my mind, I picked up my pen …