Just realized I haven't posted since last May. I'll try to be better in future.
Dust to Dust
Someone let a fly inside the house
instead of inviting death
in sorrow, perhaps it was a lonely gasp before,
(folded three times)
that morning has returned.
The deepest oceans, darkest seas
from the fingers that still type using only three at a time. If only
a perfect circle getting closer,
a vast expanse of empty-
less mom-and-pop corner stores,
unconvincingly
today. What have I done?
Arrive filled with anxiety
just to see you, to say hello,
to say goodbye and
and I praise.
Old cushions to be tossed next week
among the willow branches,
they will not witness. You may be gone,
the closing of your story.
© May 2021
Glosas at Teatime
I’ve missed my chance to invite you to afternoon tea
at the Empress Hotel on Government Street,
where the service is exquisite and the cups and plates
washed by hand, a sign of another time
when the world was isolated and people easily hidden.
Being originally from England, you would appreciate
the place settings with live flowers and linen tablecloths,
the regal portrait of the Queen centrally hung among the starkness
of white walls and blonde chairs, spaced apart to give the effect
of a private conservatory with rolling-green countryside views.
We might have spoken of your travels across this country as well
as Mexico, where you lived while your husband was Ambassador
or of the years when you took up visual art and let the poet
sleep or dream as images revealed themselves upon the canvas.
But you returned to Oak Bay to gather words together, yours and others,
to create an example of poetic form that I wish that I could craft
as you did in Holograms. I am so jealous I could cry.
© June & August 2021
Prince Edward Island
grains of rusty sand, flecks off the Teapot, sparkle loudly
upon Thunder Cove beach, many red-rock Inushuks
saluting the Gulf of St Lawrence, fields of iron-rich soil
full of potatoes for shipment off island,
by truck now there’s a two-lane bridge across the Strait
Canada’s smallest province welcomes
more than one million tourists (to eat lobster and
visit Anne of Green Gables’ farmhouse)
© October 2019 & August 2021
