The People's Poet

The photo of Milton Acorn hung in the shadows of the tavern,

his cragged face weary with bagged eyes, bulging hardships

falling free down flat cheekbones sustained by a steady gaze;

his wild hair swept back as if by an unconscious hand,

grooming that had also grazed his goatee,

causing it to jut towards the future,

towards the direction he was intent on taking,

the direction he had always taken, the way

of solidarity with the long suffering.

It was a nicotine-stained, framed image of a writer

his peers had dubbed the People's Poet.

Acorn, the unashamed communist with the carpenter's hands

and the sprawling soul troubled by war wounds and drink,
came into his voice on the provincial sandbar that is Prince Edward Island,

the place to which he soon after the picture was hung returned his remaining years.

Long ago, I sat in Grossman's tavern looking at his image,

studying the dedication to a man who reminded me of my father

and grandfather: the same shattered, political romanticism

held together by the will of their dialectic acuity:

minds that would never give up the struggle,

hearts that found company among the misbegotten

and among the deep dreaming word workers

slurring themselves to sleep in the company of fellow travelers

who always made sure they arrived safely.

I have no idea why the memory of Acorn returned to me,

I can't even remember if he and I were ever

in the same place at the same time or not,

it just feels like we were; feels like I have been celebrating

the same exuberance of longing in the anguish of existence,
defending the poet's need to speak a better world into being,

the need to accept love in all the places we find it,

the need to overthrow misery within and without, 

the need to discover mercy in the tender twilight
where dune grasses still trace haikus on tidal pool sands;

where wild bay leaf bushes on the beach at Dalvay

spoke his name to the sea of his childhood.

I also remember liking one of his poems on a poster on the subway
but don't recall a word of it;  I remember as well singing
“spun you out of my eyes fire” to my Perth County Conspiracy album,

and the hard way the People's Poet wore his gentleness on the tip of his pen.

Mostly, I remember the stained paean to Acorn on that tavern wall when I was young

and first burned with the need to un-wound the world, I remember failing at that,

and writing another poem anyway, as if sorrow contained its own antidote;

as if joy was an act of defiance, a conflagration triggered by
 the breaking of humanity; a purifying blaze
born in utterance and fed by abandoned reiteration.