I Herded by the Virus LIne

Psalmists and prophets celebrate in verse;

use all mediums to assume a shepherd's voice.

Protective, warning, directive,

we stand and deliver where we are.

Poet's remove narratives, images, thoughts, and feelings

from people's hearts and minds and breath, 

transfuse us all with new ones by turning a phrase.

A dialogue of love in an age of pandemic and climate change 

broadcasts itself

throughout all isolated dominions of light; 

deep into the rockier ranges of lockdown fevers

where darkness swallows us alone, 

and where routine 

strains all relationships inside four walls multiplied 

by however many rooms we have, 

dividing us by rooms we have not,

penned as we already are with or without wine,  

or more than another for company,

food already at hand, or not,

eating together shareable in virtual communion,

help needs discovered and dealt with by performatives.

For poets to silence, 

the page is left with only what's been written,

living voice reduced to what's been said.

Not using all mediums to say what needs to be said now

leaves time unsung for others to have noted, or heeded.

The reverberations of words are resonance chambers for emanating hope and defiance.

Without access to this now's living Wurd; 

without some medium of exchange from voice to ear,

from pen to page, from type to print, 

or from ions received by our electronics across interwebs,

we cannot entrain our words to hear and eyes to see or

wills to find common livable futures.

Our ability to endure together the particular adversities that we

are each dealing with alone in all our nuanced and myriad ways, is what

ensures we can continue to develop the collective patterns of utterance and reception 

in which we will otherwise be lost to one another.

To Susan on the West Coast

Raped at gun point by a marine on leave, a rope around your neck,
led into a field, and let go... it was me you trusted...
as dysfunctional as I was, you came to see me in New Orleans
before we camped on Pensacola Beach out of season,
then went to Disney World and Daytona
and on to The Grand Ole Opry during your nation's 200th year.
I have no idea why me, why you thought I could help,
but you did, you who taught me to paddle, and got thrown out of camp
for sleeping with me on Treasure Island the summer after our travels,
before you moved out west, before you started over,
when you needed me most, even if I am writing about it now,
even as I also wrote about it in the sections of my novel that you
approved, sent me online to find the trial information to use, but there
is still some of us unsaid, between the prose descriptions of spring
fragrances, scents that words can never bring to mind the way a single
magnolia or azalea can do on a spring day, the way that forty years of
wilderness can be crossed in a wafting breeze, carrying with it the key
of how little I did for you back then, beyond finding you
a safe place to be in New Orleans, the Mississippi
rolling all your sorrows to the delta of your dreams
while I held your hand and took you for cafe au lait and beignets,
walked us home through the Garden District under live oak
draped with Spanish moss while you healed yourself
because the only gift I ever had was hope.

The First Warm Day of Spring

Wet as it was
from the afternoon rains
the soft light of moonset,
lustrous through shadows
enveloped the evening
we savoured in whispers.

Elora Borealis

1. Interlude of Quiet

The cool air of the floor of the gorge rises from the river

to the warm heights of the plateau in the light, rain-damp afternoon,

the early spring sun lost behind cloud for days, disturbing only

the equilibrium of mist drifting through the railing balusters

of the David Street Bridge to swirl the span, caress the trees

rooted to limestone cliff edges before the updraft

dissipates the remaining haze into the gray skies

above and beyond the view from our kitchen window.

There is a tenderness in the mist, an uplift to yet another

gloomy April forecast, to the chill that refuses to surrender the season

of harsh winter, otherwise gone but for warmth delayed.

Even now, the cold-battered willows,

maples and ash, seem to heal in the soft, stray breezes,

the scars of the December ice-storm still everywhere to be seen:

lost limbs, branches; split trunks and denuded boles

seem glad of the palliative day and the care of restorative drizzle.

The human animal carries the idea of spring postponed in our bones, 
while the trees linger at their own pace, nurtured by soil and water

and the many lives in their roots

while they await the sun of their quickening.

I wait with them, glad of nuanced mercies, at peace,

because they have so far survived the changing climate,

as have I, whether doomed or not, the outcome in the balance,

trouble enough for another day, for another interlude of quiet.

When humanity comes of age

Hunkering down before the golden hour ends as they say on radiowaves Canada: the need for the young and all to stay home, for the young to keep their grandparent's safe before shelter-where-you-are is declared after the golden hour ends. More will live the more the young and all stay home sooner.

Survive together no virus in the home, memories to celebrate when pandemic death passes and the peoples of this land see how many of us survived; see how golden we were in the Games of Pandemic.

I am optimistic Canada, my love for our old Dominion, my growing distrust of Canadian values now at the crossroads, our place in all this, with our wobbly charter of rights and freedoms facing the fact that the Earth itself just changed itself in our faces; got our attention because we and especially the young and their young have worked to do when this passes, when all is just beginning to be said and done anew, they will emerge to create what is coming, chains of events will break effervescent on beachheads as common sense and best practices, carve a new epoch on the lathe of earth's turnings,shaping the epoch of humanity's coming of age as a mutually beneficial lifeform and giving it to the Earth as a token of finally understanding.

You who work the tills and stock the shelves

You who work the tills and stock the shelves in streams and waves of grocery shopping crowds,
you who show up each day of longer weeks,, you who
work a viral wrench in the guts of the tectonic shifts now playing out on planetary scales:
you who live all this for minimum wage
do so in the company of nurses and orderlies, 

you have become first responders to the homelife realities of those
in need of certainties beyond yours to place in our palms like change

To you, who bag the comfort of common togetherness food
to you who did not sign up for this when you took the job,
to you who play hero to the anxious crowd on your modest stages:

to you I say we appreciate the ordinary efficiencies
of your one customer at a time service
your small mercies to us in our turn.

We convey ourselves into and out of your lives, we pass you in aisles breaking down boxes,                     
we recognize some of you from times before. We leave you to the uneasy crowd. 

So to stockers who keep stocking, and to you whose tills ring on; time blends
a balm placed in passing for our open wound being nursed
all the long shifts of your working.

For now, let those who shop agree to stay away until near normal need returns us
to you workplaces, until then, we will isolate ourselves with your daily courage,
and say that we will back your wage demands when new normal comes.