Theatre of War

Every day is mother’s day!

Those who know me are familiar with my disdain for greeting card holidays. Even the woman who lobbied for the creation of Mother’s Day regretted the results and tried to undo it. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, should we be thankful that Mother’s Day doesn’t last all year? So, my post today is happenstance, a work ready for publication, twenty years after my mother died. The slide of my mother was taken by my father, perhaps on their honeymoon. I ungummed an old slide viewer, searched the internet for a tiny replacement bulb that had a tiny screw-in base, photographed the image and added the verse.

Silence(d)

Elsie

Born without storm into autumnal gold, 
baby Elsie wore mystery, veiled in her caul, 
seeing only the love in our fathomless eyes.

Dispatched with an angel’s kiss, she arrived 
in Thanksgiving’s low glowing sun. Yet 
the lore of the caul conjured mystery drawn 
from a shadowless night.

Untroubled by her tumultuous journey 
into the light, a spirit safe-guarded, 
she drew on her mama’s settled serenity.

Sienna and silk: sweet fleur-de-lis.

Elsie’s first cries piqued heartfelt tears 
from her little big sister. Did she fathom
a question in Mila’s unsettled lament
 – who is this?  who turned this great wheel?

With a foot in the spirit realm, could Elsie 
call up that first green unknowing?  
Her own cries subdue into little knit brows.
  
Moon to Mila’s sun, soft autumn mist
to her sweet summer dew, Elsie brings gifts 
from beyond, brings the beyond itself, 
to our earthbound wonder, and unravels 
our carebound unseeing. 

The veil slips: love arises. 

This Land

on this wave of ten-thousand-year
old moraine    sheltered
by grandmother pines planted
by long-ago school children

this land loved by the Anishinaabe

bow down
give wordless greetings
silent thanks

she who is bigger
than boundaries
greater than nations
remember her

honour her
bend and weave as basket
willow    ripple
flow with water and air

listen for unlooked-for
lessons    attend    the tender
shoots’ teachings

respect the elders
cornucopians past
they saw abundance
if only     at times    in dreams

from  wood  bone  hide  reed
they dreamed into being
drums and flutes to praise
forest  marshland  antlered buck

lands without title
but not without name
common and plain
were gardens for human hands


entitled settlers farmed
tilled up the green teachers
and sowed in their place
rows of leggy beggars

will I call the willow ‘mine’?
can you own the water
that washes you clean?
the air that bathes the earth?

may we own even the land
that shifts and slips
though it holds a stake
for the duration

of a few generations?

Diploma