Discouraged

Hanging Fire

I am fourteen

and my skin has betrayed me

the boy I cannot live without

still sucks his thumb

in secret

how come my knees are

always so ashy

what if I die

before morning

and momma’s in the bedroom

with the door closed.

 

I have to learn how to dance

in time for the next party...

Audre Lorde
1934

It was in a boardroom

It was in a boardroom

that I witnessed the latest killing

 

A room filled with knowledgeable

white people

 

trying to understand

 

what we offer

shaking their heads

not grasping

          the method, our language

          asking - Would that be recognized by others?

...

Tyler Pennock
1977

Icicle Glasses

Day thirty-nine

 

The thing that death gave you —

your face leaks

your face overflows

 

Your face is the grave of your nose

your face is the grave of your ears

your face is the grave of your face

once again your face overflows uncontrollably

 

The subzero temperature grows on your face then...

Kim Hyesoon

You can't be an NDN person in today's world

You can't be an NDN person in today's world

 

and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature

poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature — hate its guts

 

I say to my audience. There is something smaller I say to myself:

 

I don't hate nature at all. Places have thoughts — hills have backs that...

Tommy Pico

big ghosts

big ghosts contra

band my diction war

korea's north sees red as

america flags china's chopped limb

 

british crowns hong kong

cut for duplicity more capitalist than capitalist

trades commie goods

slant contagion

 

door slam hello hunger

remember japan's occupation

desperate flee inland...

Larissa Lai

Adam Father

He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear

on sun-fermented garbage.

Hungover and queasy and riled up by

bees.

Nothing going well today, he moans,

life being short and the craft, ah, long.

Still, might as well take a stab at it,

lording it over misrule and tending the

shame

that transforms a garden into...

Méira Cook

My Brother at 3 A.M.

He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps

when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.

         O God, he said. O God.

                  He wants to kill me, Mom.

 

When Mom unlocked and opened the front door

at 3 a.m., she was in her nightgown, Dad was asleep.

         He wants to kill me, he...

Natalie Diaz

Should Lanterns Shine

Should lanterns shine, the holy face,

Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,

Would wither up, and any boy of love

Look twice before he fell from grace.

The features in their private dark

Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come

And from her lips the added pigments fall,

The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.

...

Dylan Thomas
1914–1953

Love is a Moontime Teaching

love is a moontime teaching

is your kookum’s crooked smile when you pick up the phone

is another word for body

body is another word for campfire smoke

campfire smoke is the smell he leaves behind in your bed sheets

after the breakup

the word for hate sex is forest

forest sometimes means hope or lonely (depends...

Billy-Ray Belcourt

A History of Houses Built Out of Spite

none of us know Amy personally, but she’s here & she’s singing / rising above our sodden heads bowed in something like prayer / maybe // most of us are trying to move enough to pretend she doesn’t remind us of our mothers & Sunday morning spring cleans / the sharp bleached smell of it, the shrill peak of their voices demanding something far less beautiful // we’re trying not / to...

Chimwemwe Undi
1994

Letters

I threw away your letters.

Years ago, just like that.

The tight black swirls,

circles and strokes

filling fine sheets —

I would not see them again.

The last items I had left.

The dates. The phrases.

The things you said. Forfeited.

Snowflake patterns.

Leaf diagrams.

Crushed. Melted. Dissolved....

Russell Thornton
b. 1959

Hail

Hello from inside

the albatross

with a windproof lighter

and Japanese police tape.

Hello from staghorn

coral beds

waving at the beaked whale’s

mistake,

all six square metres

of fertilizer bags.

...

Adam Dickinson
b. 1974

Illegalese: Floodgate Dub

(for the Chinese maroons, British Columbia, 1999–2001)

 

if you arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to

outlaw you. but Canada is a remix B-side chorus in the globalization

loop: a sampled track of “back home”-desiring, “old days”-admiring,

democracy-dreaming, racism-reaping homesickness that even

...

Wayde Compton
b. 1972

Opus 75, Sestina in B-flat for the Glockenspiel

In the empty classroom, at sunrise, a girl

sits on the floor, staring at a glockenspiel.

She’s shredding the cuticles on her left hand

instead of starting to practise.

She doesn’t want to play —

not yet, if ever. The irritating sound

 

of her teeth clicking is the only sound

in the band room. The cranky girl

has...

Adam Sol
1969

Francesca Woodman

                              i

At the heart there is a hollow sun

by which we are constructed and undone

 

                              ii          

Behind the mirror. Favourite place to hide.

I didn't breathe. They looked so long I died.

 

...

Don Paterson
b. 1963

St John’s Burns Down for the Umpteenth Time

Let’s say the fix was in. Let’s say history,

Being human and thus short on ideas,

Made change from an old bag of tricks. Say this

Was something reported as news

On a day when your life came to no good.

The new homeless drifting from row houses

Along streets tamped down by the heedless

And paved in afterthought. Out of hollows...

James Langer
b. 1973

Poem For Duncan Campbell Scott

(Canadian poet who “had a long and distinguished career

in the Department of lndian Affairs, retiring in 1932.”

The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse)

 

Who is this black coat and tie?

Christian severity etched in the lines

he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man

who believes in work and mission. See

how he rises from...

Armand Garnet Ruffo

Cowboy Story

The books sit on the shelf, a row of coma patients

in a ward, a series of selves no longer able to learn

and trapped at the point of injury: the last page.

 

At the donor clinic I offer my arm to the spigot

of the needle and think, as I see the bag fill

with blood, there goes some of me. But that’s a lie:

 

as...

George Murray
b. 1971

Common Magic

Your best friend falls in love

and her brain turns to water.

You can watch her lips move,

making the customary sounds

but you can see they’re merely

words, flimsy as bubbles rising

from some golden sea where she

swims sleek and exotic as a mermaid.

 

It’s always like that.

You stop for lunch in a...

Bronwen Wallace
1945-1989

mixed tape

side a:

 

 

1. 18 and Life

her friend takes her to

the guidance counselor

she doesn’t see the point

but her friend won’t go

without her

 

2. Patience

...

Katherena Vermette
b. 1977

from Citizen

The rain this morning pours from the gutters and

everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your

glasses to single out what you know is there because 

doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees,

their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more

vibrant wet. Yes, and it’s raining. Each moment is like

this — before...

Claudia Rankine
b. 1963

I've Tasted My Blood

If this brain’s over-tempered

consider that the fire was want

and the hammers were fists.

I’ve tasted my blood too much

to love what I was born to.

 

But my mother’s look

was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;

her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:

and I loved her too much to like

how she dragged...

Milton Acorn
1923–1986

Modestine

We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James, who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

 

I was there, in the first of the long-term care centres, when he finished the story,

 

And we all shared the narrator’s sadness about giving up his donkey,

 

Not having...

Lynn Crosbie

Echolalia

Once one gets what one wants

one no longer wants it.

 

One no longer wants what?

 

One no longer wants what

one wanted.

 

-

 

A man and a woman want a woman and a man

or a man and a woman depending

on the man and the woman.

...

Ian Williams
b. 1979

When Winter Comes

Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,

And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,

And the skid-roads blind, and never a look

Of the Coast Range blue over Malaspina,

And west winds keener

Than jack-knife blades,

And rocks grown greener

With the long drip-drip from the cedar shades

On the drenched deep soil where the footsteps...

Marjorie Pickthall
1883-1922

What horror to awake at night

What horror to awake at night

and in the dimness see the light.

               Time is white

               mosquitoes bite

I’ve spent my life on nothing.

 

...

Lorine Niedecker
1903-1970

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

 

or press an ear against its hive.

 

I say drop a mouse into a...

Billy Collins
b. 1941

Tractor

More than a storey high and twice that long,

it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,

possessed of the ecology of some hellacious

minor island on which options

are now standard. Cresting the sections

...

Karen Solie
b. 1966

The Bull Moose

 

Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,

lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,

stumbling through tamarack swamps,

came the bull moose

to be stopped...

Alden Nowlan
1933-1983

Thou Poem

Thou poem of lost attention and half try,

do you fear more the inner world or outer?

 

I do not love the self less than the others,

my name is legion and my mouth one cry.

...

A. F. Moritz
b. 1947

Newfoundland Sealing Disaster

Sent to the ice after white coats,

rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,

they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,

slit them free of their spotless pelts.

 

The storm...

Michael Crummey
b. 1965

The New Experience

I was ready for a new experience.

All the old ones had burned out.

 

They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside

And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.

 

...

Suzanne Buffam
b. 1972

They are hostile nations

1

In view of the fading animals

the proliferation of sewers and fears   

the sea clogging, the air

nearing extinction

 

we should be kind...

Margaret Atwood
b. 1939

The Swimmer’s Moment

For everyone

The swimmer’s moment at the whirlpool comes,

But many at that moment will not say

‘This is the whirlpool, then.’

By their refusal they are saved

From the black pit, and also from contesting

The deadly rapids, and emerging in

The mysterious, and more ample, further waters.

And so their bland-blank faces turn...

Margaret Avison
1918-2007

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for...

William Wordsworth
1770-1850

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...

William Butler Yeats
1865-1939

They Flee From Me

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it...

Thomas Wyatt
1503-1542

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

...

Edgar Allan Poe
1809-1849

The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray

The winds blow bleak and shrill;

They are all gone away.

Nor is there one today

To speak them good or ill:

...

Edwin Arlington Robinson
1869-1935

When I consider how my light is spent

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide;

...

John Milton
1608-1674

Boy Remembers in the Field

What if the sun comes out

And the new furrows do not look smeared?

This is April, and the sumach candles

Have guttered long ago.

The crows in the twisted apple limbs

Are as moveless and dark.

Drops on the wires, cold cheeks,

The mist, the long snorts, silence…

The horses will steam when...

Raymond Knister
1899-1932

Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worms drew back into the mounds,

The...

Thomas Hardy
1840-1928