The Symphonic River

The symphonic river plays both sides of the bridge,

the flow of the gathering descent softly erupts

in white cap resistance to submerged rock, a gentle,

reiterated resonance heard under the concrete road span,

the lyric arches on each side posted with listening chambers.

The fall over limestone ledge levels

are accented with cascades of plummeting scales

across last year's rushes and grasses, effervescent cadences,

improvised gurgles and plops, whooshes, plunges and sprays

that whisper downstream and escape hearing: variations of nuance

layering the soundscapes, isolating strains of melody from the air.

Too diverse for fixation, too alive for inattention, the symphonic river

plays both sides of the bridge conducted by water levels over the bed of its movements,

themes of melt-flood voice solitudes of winter, internalize the virtuosity of a bend

bowed across a country road. Hours later, days later, an exuberant tranquility

continues to heal my inner ear – aching from the work of mallet on chisel

on stone – through nothing more than memories of that hot sun one sparkling afternoon

alone on a rural shoulder near the Irvine Street farm fields, moments that remain

cool in the shadows of cedar-lined banks down the curves of receding flood plains;

the awakening Earth is relived in the counterpoint of choral insects thrumming

up and down the rolling valley runoff washing over me like a balm, a mist settling

in stray beams long after my leaving; fleeting remains of impressions, clear sparkles harnessed

to the page for the sake of spoken song, the traces of our lives in our hands still;

the verses of our own winter resolves meandering downriver, fine-tuning old imagings.  

Prayer for a Symbiotic Beyond

Lord, I am becoming alienated from common experience,

from the modern world, from politics I cannot stomach, religious leaders

I will not follow, promises I never trust, a culture I find malignant, malicious to its depths, a fallen spirit is consuming everything in its path behind its false face

marketing and its commercial shallows suffocating everything of grace and beauty.

It's not that I think I am alone without common cause, or that I am

especially unique, or particularly special; I am certainly no better than some

and less bad than others, but I cannot care about what passes for caring

in a world fixated on security, on the keeping of the wolf from the door

that opens only to me and mine: a world terrified of the other,

a state of affairs machinated into being

by masters of war and manufacturers of poverty.

I have no home Lord, not in a province becoming bungalow upon town house upon

neighbourhood upon subdivision, sprawl upon sprawl spreading like a virus,

the banality of evil subsuming woodlots, forests, creeks, streams, rivers, ponds:

the natural world of my childhood, eviscerated by the mundanities of sameness,

by streets that could be lost anywhere in North America, by big box plazas and

stores of identical looks and products and prices built on the wage slavery

of third world misery, places I refuse to enter, thresholds I refuse to cross,

profiteers I refuse to aid and abet, privateers whose crown charters should be revoked and their hold on the commerce of the commonwealth broken forever.

And I am just as alienated from my nation, Father. I was twelve when Canada celebrated

its first century, I came of age certain we would change the world for the better,

but now I find Canadians slouching towards our sesquicentennial

like the beast towards Bethlehem hoping to be born as a succubus

on the tar sands of Isengard, while the Just Society staggers

towards oblivion hand in hand with the Whore of Babylon

pimped by the minions of Mammon in Don Cherry jackets

and Harper hair-helmets rolling up the rim to lose ourselves

among the litter on the road to the hell of our best intentions.

Canada dismays me, betrays me, Lord

we have become a self-satisfied people

resting on the laurels of our predecessors, while

we surrender our rights and freedoms to oligarchs

coming for our water, our land and our air: debt enslaved,

we do what we are told, not because we are too polite to resist,

but because we bought into the low-end dream of 'nation as' beer ad;

more interested in the outcome of hockey games than in the natural world

about to evict our species for trashing the place. I have no home in the Canada

that is defined by a coffee chain named after a drunk driving Maple Leaf

who killed himself in a car crash; we have developed the souls of

fast food franchises, Lord whose products would actually prevent anyone from ever

becoming an Olympian if they lived off the crap that is served every day using

temporary foreign workers and dead end wage earners who can't feed, shelter or clothe themselves or their families on the pay they get from their billionaire bosses.

We pride ourselves as a nation on our compassion in times of global disasters Father,

but then refuse to face the realities of life for the disenfranchised

at home and around the world, we lack the courage to challenge the rich

and so sell out everyone below us on the food chain so that

the people who run the world don't take away what they allow us:

we are a nation of moral cowards, but this too shall pass.

And it will pass because You buried within us

the mutually beneficial creatures that humans are inexorably becoming.

Older generations like mine may be busy

dying into the husks of our lost causes, but the young are busy

being born into humanity's best shot at redemption;

because all the answers already exist, Sermon on the Mount answers

no more complex than the cooperative lessons of Sesame Street;

answers no more complicated than just enough people refusing to remain idle,

refusing to become prey of economic predation,

defying the ways and means of greed.

You know, better than I Father, that our young will arrive at the tipping point together,

inside or outside their boxes, crossing the single axle of time, in time,

because once tipped, nothing will be the same, ever,

and all that once seemed insurmountable will become history.

That is my hope, my trust; the remnant of my defiance:

some of the young will rise as we fall, they will cross the fulcrum

of Social Darwinism; and a small but significant portion will become other

in the heart beat of the evolutionary instant and after that,

they will raise their children as symbiotic lifeforms on a symbiotic planet;

as new creatures in a new creation, in a world without end. Amen.