collage & bricolage
stanchion
A year ago I reread Phoebe Wang’s poem Invasive Carp and was inexplicably taken with a word she used – stanchion. From the word and it’s etymology and associations grew eight pages of musings and stabs at scraps of verse. I’d also had in mind for many years a favourite old photograph of snow fencing along Woodbine Beach, and its negative strip, curiously a similar shade of cinnabar as the fence itself. (I now cannot say which of the word-image pair informed the other.) I worked on the writing December 2019, February 2020, this summer, this fall. In between, I retrieved old barnboard, that weathered red again, and made a haptic poem with pieces of barbed wire. Over time, the barnboard offcuts called to me – I made my long imagined collage of fencing, and it’s opposite, a fenceless study of the prairie, the big sky of Majestic Ranch. Bob Dylan’s line from Mr. Tambourine Man became the focus of the combined multi-media work, and Mr. Tambourine Man himself, my long-time partner, John, the dedicatee. And now, as the leaves depart, the fences again become visible, but meager, man-made and easily overcome. Can you say the same for your own fences?
Stanchion!
for John
and but for the sky there are no fences facing
Bob Dylan
more than a fence to slow the blowing snow
stanchionesque stockades put on a show
of guarding the shifting sands of status quo
impaling the hearts of the fenced
with ignorance made manifest
but for trees there’d be no fences facing
the tree alive teaches you to love the sky
it feeds its own leaves freedom to depart
laden with fruit its bending branch
bows down, earth-grateful, full of grace
but for lifeless fences facing in your mind
you are free to stand (buttress or blockade?)
free to bend and resonate, be lute, sitar,
marimba, flute - your song the limitless
sky - the freedom, unconstrained, to fly
Montreal Massacre
August 6 and 9 are the 75th anniversaries of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am rereading John Hersey’s account of six hibakusha, literally “explosion-affected persons”, thinking of the tiny lanterns set afloat on the river each August, and the Hiroshima memorial/museum, which, if I had a bucket list, would be on it. On the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing, city sidewalks were filled with chalk outlines of human forms, mimicking the only traces of instantly incinerated victims.
I made a point of completing another anniversary project this week, one I started just after New Year, about the 30th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, whose date was December 6 2019. This anniversary, of an event which happened in my lifetime, became the thorn on the red rose, useless repetition, regression, the record with a skip in it. It started as a poem but devolved into an assemblage, finally becoming a setting for a ‘poem’ (or the world’s shortest play). I literally stick it to the white ribbon campaign, with side trips into Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Greek tragedy. I have tried to remain positive! Res ipse loquitur.
Montreal Massacre Dramatis Personae The Fates, robed in white, whom Erebus begot on Night: Clotho : with spindle and loom and white linen thread Lachesis : unspooling ribbon with a measuring rod Atropos: small and terrible, wielding shears Chorus of Women: heard from the distant land of the dead Priestesses of Hestia: tending the embers, gift of their god Suppliant Women: terribly small, hiding their tears Mute: the rifle-maker, the soap-box builder, the brooding recluse A winter night, lit by the moon The Chorus sings basso continuo: weave draw cut pin Clotho: I spin the sacred strands of my own self and weave them into cloth that is fine and pure, endowed with all that is divine. . weave draw cut pin Lachesis: I draw web-delicate lengths of ribbon, read with fingers fine and pure the life unfurled, imperfect, yes, and in places rough. weave draw cut pin Atropos: I execute a cut, my silver blade so fine and pure a lightening strike in darkest night. weave draw cut pin Suppliant Women: We pin the ribbons, wipe our tears, and pin again, against the pain, sacrifice the captured small white butterflies, surrender our dead sisters to the page, that we be free to turn, to wholly occupy the stage. weave draw cut pin Priestesses: Majestic women, immeasurable as flame! You carry within you our sacred blaze. But do not settle for remembrance and release. Hestia’s embers burn eternal and for eternal peace. Exeunt: the rifle-maker, the soap-box builder, the brooding recluse
a poem for Mila Grace
what could we give you, tiny jewelled shrine which bears all gifts, you, so perfectly gifted? evening sky eyes, scintillate, our stardust past made present delicate mouth, oracular, we bow before its wordless wisdom cinnamon spun silk hair swirls in the merest breath of air pearl-tipped fingers strum our heartstrings’ silver tones sugar sweet velvet cheek calls forth our own golden grace you, so bravely born, named yet numinous, enchant us treasure, we will purify each other in crystal waters of gifted love Gramia June 6 2020
ekphrasis
Every musée needs a display. That was the conceit behind my wish to add a poem, in the form of a ‘label’, to Vicky’s wonderful assemblage, on view in Gallery. An ekphrastic poem is at once description, reflection, expansion of a work of art (or – god forbid- its meaning.) What came to mind was discovery…the path…twilight…friends…fog….arising…who are you?…ambiguity….
a milk-chilling mist
are you approaching are you
disappearing friend
We Call it Canada
Here is a poem I wrote on the occasion of Canada’s 150th birthday, initially inspired by the first line of Gwedolyn MacEwan’s Dark Pines Under Water….”This land like a mirror turns you inward”. What followed was four plus pages of notes about Canada and the notions of big-C and little-c country. I completed a version of the poem in time for a June 2017 Cobourg Poetry Workshop reading celebrating Canada and Canadian poets, but fiddled with it for another year while working on a collage setting for the poem, which is displayed below.
But let’s get to the fun! The many kinds of ice and snow we settlers care not to name….snow falling, snow on the ground, crystalline snow on the ground, snow used to make water, ice in general, freshwater ice for drinking, slushy ice by the sea, snow in which one sinks, what can become a house, a drift of hard snow that formed after a storm, skim ice, new ice, rime on plants, ice that breaks after its strength has been tested with a harpoon, ice that cracked and refroze then the tide changed, snow in large flakes, bloody snow, bright snow, dirty snow, deep snow, heavy wet snow, nasty snow, slippery snow, soft snow…..
This land is pink and undefended
on a map, though on the ground
one snowy frozen step
is very like the last, and you’ll find
no welcome mat.
Still, we’ll welcome you
(while winking at the killing
cold and winter
sun that will not rise
above a frown).
We slip with tipsy fervour
towards the US
borderline, smug
that Borealis has our backs,
cloaked snugly in the mythic
north, it’s keening wind,
its endless night, muskeg
sparse with blackened
spruce, tundra dense
with crazy-making bugs,
those fifty words for ice and snow
that we don’t know,
and always something farther
farther north.
Famous dark parka, we ever turn
our backs on your
creation, heedless of the grace
with which you’re weft
of land and water, bear,
and bird, anishinaabe
and innu, wisdom
and courage, the spirit gifts
of gichi manitou.
Mia Burrus
Nov 2018
We Call it Canada 
draft for a collage with Canada poem
A Slender Villanelle for a Bell
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee the bell’s clear ring sweet purification for you it sings the flowering of earthly creation’s a bell’s pure ring and signalling our deep veneration how true it sings far echoing long reverberation the bell’s deep ring when everything’s hell fire and damnation so too it sings and wisdom brings a grave revelation the bell’s clear ring- for you it sings mia burrus feb 2017