Ate so many zucchini this summer – my / garden was almost / Bursting with the glut of great, green / Canoes, yes, that huge, and (my / fault) largely forgotten in the shade of their
/ Dark leaves, prickled, palmate, / Enormous enough to conceal the / Fat vegetal weight until I stooped and saw and / Gathered them guiltily in, my kitchen counter / Heaped with these waiting torpedoes, waiting for / Ideas of
/ Just what I would make.
About 1200 years ago, a Persian scientist wrote two important texts about computation and arithmetic. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī worked at the Grand Library of Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and was one of the most famed scholars of the period. Although there are few recorded details about his life, we do know where he…
The rain is on and off this week, and my house is disordered with books. My husband has been bringing boxes of them home from his office at the university because the roof there needs repairs and afterwards, all the staff offices are to be repainted and reassigned. A bit of a shuffle all round….
When my youngest was very small, he always carried a kaleidoscope to church. Technically, it wasn’t a kaleidoscope but a teleidoscope for toddlers: a solid wooden toy he could keep in his pocket. We went to a large church with columns, candles and stained glass windows, and every Sunday, he’d inspect the sanctuary through his…
It must have been dark in the belly of the whale. No horizon in sight. No hills. No plains. No rosy-fingered dawn. No marker of a new day. It was a time away, but not the one he was hoping for. At the opening of the book of Jonah, the prophet had his sights set…
In the introduction to her final poetry collection, Luci Shaw writes about the slow, winter growth of an amaryllis bulb on her kitchen windowsill. A little further on, she reflects on her own long life: “I can live only one day at a time, and my hope is to live that one day fully and…
Harry Plantinga, a professor at Calvin University in Michigan, is designing a chatbot that acts as a spiritual director. His web-based Journee app is part of a study group on centring prayer. New users are greeted with a friendly message and an invitation to describe their personal prayer habits. “There’s no right or wrong answer…
I’ve been surprised by mending. I’ll start the story by saying that when I wrote my January column about mending, forgiveness and Louise Bourgeois’ spider sculptures, I did not expect it to be a personal prediction. I didn’t expect much of January at all. Despite the new year, January can drag on like an old…
Last January, the house I grew up in was empty. My mother had moved in with one of my sisters. Over the spring and summer, we emptied shelves and found new homes for family things, trying to hold on to memories while preparing the house for sale. My parents owned that house for over forty…
They should have left long ago, but they are still here. I check every morning, though the light is weak in the courtyard, my fingers stiff and the cold latch awkward. And every morning, they are there, sitting up on the branch, their feathered crests like crowns bright in the wintering daylight. I wonder if…
I came across a strange little story in the Gospel of Matthew. I’d been looking for words about kingship because the November lectionary brings the church year to a close with the celebration of Christ as King, and so I stumbled upon Matthew 17: 24-27. At first glance, it looks like another version of the…
Poetry in Place is a collection of attention. This anthology, edited by Deborah Bowen and Noah Van Brenk, brings together a wide diversity of poetic voices, each reflecting on their experiences of one small region of Southern Ontario. Imagined as “the land between the waters,” this area between Lake Ontario and the Grand River, west…
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