Your Laugh and My Laugh | Mónika Tóth
Your eyes and my eyes
Talking to each other
Every day
Your smile and my smile
Talking to each other
Every day
Your laugh and my laugh
Talking to each other
Every day
How sweet you are
places to post poetry
First Tattoo | Mónika Tóth
Dedicated to my adorable Romanian friend
first tattoo
next to
your name
Vasile
a red rose
Lambs to the Slaughter | Stan Morrison
We miss shaking friends’ hands
And the warmth of their embrace
What’s called a greater good
We are fulfilling our civic duty
Masks sanitizers and distance
Those elected to do better
Are always up to no good
Masquerading evil intentions
With the latest sanitized spin
Humanity way in the distance
Re-election trumps sanity
The curve has not flattened
In the bars and at the rallies
The greater good is really
Us lambs to the slaughter
Washa-Quon-Asin* | Dee Allen
Many who had hiked through Canadian wilderness
[ A century ago ] Took notice of a bird in flight
A rare one the Ojibwa called
Washa-quon-asin–He who flies by night
At once: a hunter, a guide, a trapper
A living made from the furs in his sight
A rare one the Ojibwa called
Washa-quon-asin–He who flies by night
Into his forest lair, he gave shelter to a pair
Of beavers & a female pony
Beautiful, willful, contrite
A rare one the Ojibwa called
Washa-quon-asin–He who flies by night
He recorded every caper onto pages of paper
Turned articles & books
Thousands read his every insight
A rare one the Ojibwa called
Washa-quon-asin–He who flies by night
He took bold strides to speak for trees & wild lives
Nature’s preservation against devastation became his plight
A rare one the Ojibwa called
Washa-quon-asin–He who flies by night
Then he travelled to an evening pow-wow,
Where he’d shown native chiefs how
He embraced their ways,
Mastered their sacred dances by firelight
A rare one the Ojibwa called
Washa-quon-asin–He who flies by night
In Canada & England, news had spread:
One day at home, he was suddenly dead
His secret’s out: The “Red Indian”
Was English & White
A rare one the Ojibwa called
Washa-quon-asin–He who flew by night
But never mind the buckskins, the feathered headdress, the moccasins
Or false tales about his past, every sleight
A rare one the Ojibwa called
Washa-quon-asin–He who flew by night
His other steps were true, after all,
Preventing ecology’s steady fall
What mattered was the nature of his fight
A rare one the Ojibwa called
Washa-quon-asin–He who flew by night.
______________________________
W: Canadian Aboriginal Day 2014
[ For Archibald Belaney a.k.a. Grey Owl–1888 – 1938. ]
*OJIBWE: “Grey Owl”.
[ From the new book Elohi Unitsi: Poems [ 2013 – 2018 ],
Conviction 2 Change Publishing, 2020. ]
Conviction 2 Change Publishing, 2020. ]
Solid Ground | Wandering Biku
Still searching for that solid centre ground.
Knowing that the only reliable thing
Is Unreliability
Just ain’t helping right now.
Eroded self trust is my foundation,
my bedrock, my stability.
And time and time and time again
The ever powerful waves of self doubt
Undermine and eat away
At what is supposed to be my touchstone.
No matter how quickly and steadfastly the defences are built,
Those cracks of insecurity fill with
The constant drip, drip, drip of
Muddied, toxic delusion until once again
The ironic inevitability of unreliability crumbles,
Washing away the solid, centre ground.
Final Scene | J. K. Durick
When I finally leave, and I will eventually,
I’ll do something theatrical, stand there mid-
room saying my say, with gestures worthy
of the scene. I imagine a little Lear perhaps
or, more fitting, Willy Loman, my overdone
version of heroic. I’ll stand full height, with
shoulders back, at attention, and demanding
attention from my audience, the groundlings
I have left, those jaded theater goers who for
some reason stayed around for the last act of
my little play. I have been practicing my lines
for years, watched so many friends say theirs
as they departed stage left, tried to catch each
phrase and move they made, set my phrasing
accordingly, would practice for hours before
any available mirror. I’m saying, I am finally
ready to leave, deliver my ultimate oration,
my closing soliloquy, deliver it and then turn
in a slightly stagy way and be gone, finally,
and you thought I’d never leave.
Thunderstorm | J. K. Durick
The incident, what happened, has to do
with the nature of things, the nature of
the pieces painted into the scene. First,
there’s the thunderstorm, not unexpected
this time of year, late summer, they start
at a distance, rumble and roar as they come
on, then here with wind and brief ferocious
rain, the sound effects center it, like some
angry god coming down on the guilty and
innocent alike. Then there’s the dog, my son’s
dog actually, who spends a lot of time with
us, she’s easily frightened by loud noises,
terrified by thunder, so terrified it’s as if
the word terrified came into being because
she was there in a thunderstorm, terrified.
I’m the last figure in the scene, not quite
the hero of the story, but I was there trying to
somehow fix what nature had made of things.
The thunderstorm came on, dogs hear them
first and react, so she raced to the cellar door
then downstairs, the thunder rippled and roared,
and she curled up shaking, trembling as if she
had become unhinged, whimpering, trying to
hide, further into herself, her fear. And I was there
sitting on the floor next to her, patting her head,
saying her name over and over in the most soothing
voice I could come up with, as if what I said in that
soothing voice could fix the nature of things, the way
things always seem to be.
