Mantis

you tilted that pea eye,
turned your ugly head
and i fell in love with you,
a wonder in the desert
dying in the wheeled ruts

you are nothing
to look at some might say,
a good Merlot over you any day

perhaps you pray for them
as they walk down the perfect rows
with an unwillingness to know
that you have a right to exist

MS means my song

she worries about things
inside her, the shudder
of a world trying to be free,
a mystery of blood in search of itself,
sometimes lost, a deadend
and the return to the brain,
over and over until her heart
stops for but a moment,
such sweet sanctuary
to consider what is eternal,
what can be done,
what can be undone 

it is not worry after all,
she knows her limitations,
the relapsing,
the remitting,
and the secrets of flesh
and what death will bring
it is more than that,
she sees beyond herself,
to her children,
answers for them before her bones
crumble beneath her

and I have done nothing in my life
but witness what is courage,
what is depth, what is compassion
and what it means to know
that the birds still sing for her

Summerfall

the hills are amber,
soft light now
just before the sun slips
into an imagined sea

apricot grasses,
the colours of September
when the heat lifts
from your sorrows

could it be the quenching
of all thirsts when the first
leaves give up their summer?

i love the absence of crowds,
overnight, and the chill before the
same light returns

soon apples will fall into
your eager hands
and the blue-dusted grapes
spin like worlds in your eyes

September

From my novel Lady With Flowers:

I like September because it is a new beginning. Every year. How about that? To me it seems like the beginning of the year. Everything new and fresh – clothes and shoes – latest trends and fashions filling the hallways in every school – and behaviours changing too as if arriving on the stage of a new play – new characters and a new plot. The plot really doesn’t change, but what changes is the way the characters respond to the plot – the way roles seem to change with the years, refining, redeeming – some no more relevant than outmoded technology. And yet it arrives with the eagerness of spring. It is a time when the mind wants to begin again – when learning waits for the bell – that same bell calling children and young men and women to invest in the world.

It is a sweet time of the year. There is a quality to the light that is clear and sharp. The air hangs with a sense of optimism – something at hand that drives us forward. The demarcations seem undisputable. The direction of our lives seems certain. We are engaged with our lives. We study, we learn. We are on the edge of our futures unfolding before us. Yes, it is a time for the youth of the world to listen to the teachers and the mentors and the sacredness of life. And the truth is, we never stop learning. There will always be September. We all know when it arrives. We all remember. Be students. Everyday and in every way. Be students of life. The school is the Earth. God is your teacher. The curriculum is love.

Jack Layton - 1950 - 2011

a man comes by and you know him,
some place inside you that recognizes
what is good in the world

a man comes by and you listen to him
because truth does not harm, does not
want anything but your battered heart

a man comes by and you follow him,
not aimless idolatry but out of a country's
yearning to be more

a man comes but once in a lifetime
to teach the teachable
and humble the proud

Grasshopper

a mule sun and colour
has bled out of the hills,
all is straw and dry throats
but there is thriving in the wastes,
leaping before your feet
as if to free themselves
from the baking earth,
grasshoppers
with their ridiculous legs
made for such bounds

we caught them as boys,
bait for trout in the clear streams
they left tobacco juice on our fingertips
as we impaled them on our hooks,
a grizzly ritual to be sure

i enjoy them now
creeping in their hesitant way,
mechanical, a whimsical
circumspection through the deck glass

Red Peppers

I see them pause to touch you,
fingertips unbelieving along
the market sidewalks,
something to feel
in an artificial world

I would like to stuff you
into my vacant heart,
replace that parched
and withered thing,
set it ablaze until I burst
with colour

Don't try and stop me, I am no thief
but a budding eccentric,
play along with me
until the bleeding fills my shoes