If I could tilt my ear
To the world next to ours
If my voice carried
Through the dimensions
We would rewrite loss
And sing on
A new register
*
https://ottawacitizen.remembering.ca/obituary/michael-ip-1082083615
If I could tilt my ear
To the world next to ours
If my voice carried
Through the dimensions
We would rewrite loss
And sing on
A new register
*
https://ottawacitizen.remembering.ca/obituary/michael-ip-1082083615
Whatever you call it
The city around me
Makes constant noise
Or so I thought
But not everything is noise
The birds, the neighbours
Dissecting gardens
Are not
The children, the dogs
Are sometimes
While the leafblowers
Always
The city around me
Is not loud
It is the engines around me
That make the noise
A bird within a droplet
Her wings a twig above and below
Made small by diminishing subsets
Of the flights that she can make
A tree turned orange, brilliant
In the early days of spring
Briefly printed on windshields’ slant
In the sounds of wheels it falls
I wait at the bus stop
Until the end of it all
The moments stolen from metal canopies
Spiderwebbing overhead
They float away on cirrostratus seas
And dissolve in candy-coloured light
No net so fine could be devised
As would catch and hold them back
And yet the stragglers sometimes hide
Soft as feathers, bright as lies
On the undersides of flowers
Miles of old regrets become
Miles of canyon salts
In walls of iridescence and
In pillars that arch and fall
Past blindness leaving questions
The answers never to be found
Only stepping stones in crystal
To the plateaus ringed around
Away, if I could but go
And climb like days of old
The hidden hills, clinging
‘Mid the horizon’s lowest folds
Tell me when the greys will brighten
And ease recover haste
And sharper relief lay to rest
The years that went to waste
You are no more
Than the smell of memory
As the rain brings you down
From the wisteria
You’ve left me with a square-ish space
These four walls and hours baked
With horns, insults, demands pounding through.
The drywall can’t hold back the swell
So my space shrinks and time retells
The same stories of trippy, sleepless, broken nights.
Squished and squished and cut down some more
To fit your size, should I go out the door
Not daring to protect my face, my heart,
My lungs that cry to breathe apart
From the taunts that follow masks or medicine.
God forbid that we should be free
To live in peace or quiet or safety
That we should learn from what has kept us whole so far –
So scream and pollute and tear from me
My flags, my stoop, my grocery
And call it your freedom, duly crowned.
I want to give more than I can
All those years without you
The baked grass of my childhood
And the nights in red and black
It comes with wanting more of you
The yous that I can never meet
Samson hair and fresh-eyed grin
You as you are now
With all you were then
What place is this
A hostile defense
A victim and a tyrant
That I heedlessly chose
For myself
Connecting to nature through poetry and prose
| Heart on Fire |
Thoughts, Stories, Poems
Un poème n'est jamais fini, seulement abandonné. A poem is never finished, only abandoned."Paul Valéry"
The Poetry of Emotion
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