And the Bible says, God created day and night,
land and sea, flying birds and swimming fish.

And in between (but not mentioned), God made
more beauty: dawn and dusk, intertidal wonder,
corral reefs and estuaries, squirrels with wings,
penguins, soaring dolphins, flying cod,
and platypus, for heaven’s sake!
Not to mention the purple-throated sunangel,
one non-conforming hummingbird,
or the “half-sider” cardinal, a male/female chimera,
split down the middle, in marvelous colouration
and morphology of both — and never mistreated by the flock.

And humans, male and female, God made them,
and in between (but not mentioned), still more beauty:

a red-lipped, purple-fingertipped trans woman
who loves to dance, and when she does,
sparkles like stirred coals;
and two trans men, whose love for each other,
whose love for others, expressed through the vocations
they’ve taken on, rise above
the fear-based rejections they’ve faced;
and like Jay, who carries a weight of unseen pain,
from bricks thrown by a pious mob, 
defending an exclusionist reading of Genesis,
and yet, because she’s come home to her body,
has adopted the name, Joy.

Clearly, this poem is not a polemic. Just a rather simple (simplistic?) observation — towards tolerance. As it is, I personally know some wonderful trans people (which is an advantage), so I worry about the ever-growing anti-trans rhetoric that is fueling far-right politics, galvanizing a segment of Christianity, giving a certain liberty to paramilitary and neo-Nazi hate groups, resulting in a year-by-year increase in violence against trans and gender non-conforming people. Framing this is the systematic erosion of their human rights. Already this year, just south of our border, state lawmakers have introduced 460 bills attacking the rights of LGBTQ+ people, with 356 bills specifically targeting transgender people. Obviously, Canada is not immune (there are, and will be, ongoing attacks on Bill C-16). In the meantime, we can remember that LGBTQ+ rights, are human rights; and maybe, should we wish to reinforce that, we can talk to trans people, listen to their stories.

The day has begun.
Across the ink-dark bay, the barest hints of light.
Pale pinks and a suggestion of peach, etch
an outline of Salt Spring Island.

A dark-eyed junco is the first to sing. Now,
the breeze-less morning gathers its long shadows,
and the sun slowly explodes above the island’s crown.

In my place at the window, it is good to feel my smallness
and my brevity, like the pale flame of a match, against
the sky’s red blaze and wordless horizon.

I can’t trace the time, exactly, but my gratitude
has become corroded; my instinct for praise
has been dulled by the din of topical news,
its noise, like the seventh circle of hell.

I’ve learned that the first birds to sing in the dawn chorus
are those with the biggest eyes. So here I am,
doing a kind of mind-eye tai chi, to get my soul back.

Me and the dark-eyed junco, reading the light,
analyzing the alchemy of mist on the bay,
studying the vague sway of a looming hemlock,
the incarnadine storyline of a neighbour’s magnolias.

I never made it through Dante, but one thing stuck:
that dawn should open my mouth in song,
and to will to refuse is hell.

I have called a friend who says he is sitting on his front step
watching a bald eagle who is watching him, carefully,
from the crown of a Sitka spruce. I tell him it is an omen for good.

He is labouring under a sentence, lodged in the linings of a lung,
                                                   brittle fascicles of worry,
like stiff dry grass thrust through February snow.

I have called the sea-fogged hills and the big-leaf maples
and have asked them why, on this planet shrouded in soft
hallowed light, our souls, like raptors, remain restless,
                                                                          for illumination.

I have seen cities, with grieving houses, where
somewhere, in a seldom-used kitchen, a sixties song
is breaking the heart of an aging woman, somewhere,
in a lonesome bedroom, a boy is trained by a slim screen.
somewhere, a girl in high school is in the back of a police car,
                                                              somewhere, more sirens.

I have called to the rain. I said, “Add my tears to your flask.”
I have called to my parents, and friends, who have passed,
who, like mute doves in distant places,
echo my long silent mourning, and still,
I hear the cantering beauty of their voices.

I turned to God and shouted, “Does being have a meaning?”
and round some parabolic room, came Mystery’s whisper,
“Ask instead, does meaning have a Being?”

And I thought of the risen Christ, and I called
to the Easter moon that rose above the paschal sky,
and in the light of morning, I saw the eagle and the rain
and the boy and the sea-fogged hills and the city of sorrow,
with its cemetery at the limits, and I asked,
“Who are in these graves?” And Christ said,
                                                                  “No one!”

And suddenly I heard, as though above the hem of time, all beings 
of earth, mothers and fathers, companions and partners,
                                              cry out with love.