Butterflies
Butterflies / So quiet, so subtle / Fluttering nearby / Sometimes I miss their colours / Bright patterns in the wind / Sometimes I miss people too / Bright, unique, beautiful
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The stories we tell
The stories we tell ourselves / are eye-witness / first person accounts / from the front line / of what it means to be me. / With a twist.
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Indigenous hospitality
Throughout Hearts Exchanged, participants encounter ‘hearts broken’ experiences as they hear first-hand stories from Indigenous people, and learn history from a new perspective. Hearts Exchanged offers the space and opportunity to discuss, reflect, and turn to right relationships – both personally and corporately. Jasper Hoogendam (from Coldsprings, Ont.) participated in Hearts Exchanged over the past…
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When father prays
I know it I know whose sweat irrigates our plastered floor like a field. Gethsemane is a place I don’t struggle to picture in my bed since Father’s groaning is enough, a longing sample of Jesus’ night of arrest. I know how he bargains to dodge his cross before the cock crows. I know…
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For a Nazareth carpenter
For a Nazareth carpenter / who lived only 33 years / Your name sure got out.
/ It pops up all over the place.
/ I hear it at a curling event last week.
/ Books
/ movies,
/ the general public use it often. -
So that nothing worse happens to you
His sick and mine might’bin
/ more related than I understood
/ first time reading the story,
/ might be more in common now
/ thinking about it, how before
/ all the unwell and broken would
/ go, and if prohibited by their
/ ailment or otherwise, would be
/ brought, so they would be healed;
/ only not this time. -
A Prayer for Our Times
O Father God, the Lord of all,the one who sent your sonwho mother-like her people calledto come to her for helpand safety from the comingholocaust of Rome or Hunand later still the Teutonand now the terror wreaked bySlav on brother, sister Slav today. . . peoples, nations, folk,who had no optionbut to choose to sufferas…
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Eating a Pear Reminds Me of Her
Eating a pear reminds me of her:my grandmother half a century agoin her stalwart putty-grey brick housewith the pear tree in the yardat 40 Euclid;the sticky trickle down the heel of my nine-year-old handand onto my shortsrecalled as if it were today. My drooping hydrangeas remind me of her:brisk scissors in handreaping huge white blooms…
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Advent
I fainted this morning. For a few seconds, the world stopped spinning,as planets hurricane-whippedthrough winter air. Heaviness. Darkness.Memory skipped a beat, time two beats,life suddenly shown up, a scratched audio CD.I opened my eyes, cheek on cement. Today was the coldest yet.Each boot thrust through icesplintered the memory of hills. At work, I utter this…
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Fireflies
Out in the countrythe stars speak to you.Sometimes their silver tongues singshimmering in vast choirsin cathedrals of night.Beneath their singing,two boys run over dark earth,racing, tumbling, laughing through the dusk,fast as a rabbit’s heart beating,its blood dancing, pulsing through veins… My twin brother ahead of me,breathing out brightnesswithin warm night windas we drift through soft…
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Things Too High For Me
Lord, my heart is not haughty: Of course, I had the advantage of birth: born in Springside,voted least haughty hamlet in Saskatchewan. Nor my eyes lofty: One pretty much follows the other: farming town, curling rink,proud of our blizzards, which kept us from taking the Yellowheadto Yorkton – massive, unpredictable city. Neither do I exercise…
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‘And what if he tells you to make poems?’
“Though I have never been to Mount Olive, New Jersey,I have spent years of my reading life on the Mount of Olives,trespassing, looking for a brown-skinned teacher…” writes Brad Davis in his book’s title poem, inspired by a news report of a trespassing teen in Mount Olive, New Jersey. The poem summarizes well the quest…
