Sometimes, words fall through space
out of sheer loneliness; pine for connection.
Take any noun, on its own,
vagrant, indigent, languishing in isolation.
But should a willing adjective stop by, noun
is changed, charged, coloured, like a scarlet macaw.

And see the verb that glances,
how it’s struck by the painted preposition,
enticed into a syntactical ménage à trois
to create the tight triadic world of a sentence.

Forging fact or fantasy, mask or vulnerability,
able to convey beauty or blight, hate or light,
or this singular thought: Go on gorgeous,
get over yourself,
come on down to the water’s edge,
join our ragged tide of loss, hope, and clumsy love.

I know a poet who bends low
to listen to the spaces between words.
Labours to narrow the gap of these small cracks
through which meaning falls.
Resists the temptation
to choose the better sounding word
rather than the right one.
Waits for 20 years
until the better sounding word
becomes the right one.

For language is a river,
its headwater unscalable, unseen;
gathers a lexicon from the great glossal basin
of branches, feeders, rills;
and the dialectic silt from distant rains.

The river flows toward fluent confluences
of meaning; meaning shared,
then sundered by rocks and rapids;
languishes in argot eddies, reconstitutes
in quiet currents.

Sediment, marl, alluvial sleep, force
the lingual bends into overstated loops
until the banks are breached and the bend
cut off, leaving behind an oxbow lake,
stagnant as Latin.

And still the river flows, courses
toward some grand delta: is it not our deep, spreading desire,
for the reversal of Babel? categories undone, borders overrun
by raids of goodwill, people listening, not shouting,
blind biases burned away, kindness raining.

Out on the eastern terminus of Suturna Island, I crept
past tide pools and reams of seaweed and knelt
on the jagged basalt; knelt at the blue foot
of Mount Baker, before the spirit of heron,
under the eye of a sailing osprey:

and all my cursory science and measly philosophies:
exposed, like the rust on these rocks;
all my anthropocentric chuffs,
washed out to sea.

For what do I know about the consciousness of a sea hawk—
riding the sway of wind above a wake, or following
a spirant current from a great height.

And what do I know about the inner life of a heron,
its imperial reflection upon a hemisphere of water,
her patience absorbing the arc of morning,
a contemplation unfathomed by a Merton.

Or what do I know of the animacy, or even
the awareness of a mountain,
its powers of understanding, telling of glory,
its eons-old atoms, the same as my own.

I have so much to unlearn.

The border of Gaza is outlined by the bodies of children.
The children who escape until the next raid
dream of a day without tremors. Weaned under oxide clouds,
fostered in the cinders of not being counted they fashion weapons
out of charred wood and rebar and fantasize about survival. *

I’ve read of a man from a country that supports the country
that raids its neighbour. He believed empathy is a fantasy.
Sympathy is possible, he said, but empathy does a lot of damage.

I’ve also read of people who believe life is a series of resurrection-like
awakenings. They wonder: If only we had the opportunity to try out
being a Métis boy in a Residential School one day, and then the next day,
a girl in Afghanistan, then a migrant mother detained in Texas,
a Jew in Warsaw wearing a yellow star, a Palestinian teenager
washing her baby sister, wrapping her body in a kafan,
that milk-white cotton burial shroud.

I read about a woman who anointed the feet of a storyteller.
The storyteller had become famous for compassion and forgiveness,
and the woman loved him. She used the most expensive perfume—
they said the whole house was filled with a wondrous fragrance—
then she dried his feet with her hair.

Later, the reporter who wrote down the story added that many
thought it an offence, a spectacle, and a great waste. However,
the storyteller, who apparently knew he’d soon be lynched,
said it was a beautiful preparation for his burial.

There’s a country with a newly rebranded Department of War.
Recently, they made a short movie. It displays tanks and paratroopers,
aircraft carriers and jets, fiery contrails and boiling lines of smoke
behind speeding missiles, while the Secretary of War
solemnly recites the Lord’s Prayer.

If you look through the papers of that ancient reporter,
this is the prayer that follows: Blessed are the compassionate,
the merciful, the mourners, the peacemakers…
It’s the prayer the storyteller taught.
The one who lived in the same place where today,
the bodies of children lie.

*With prayers, yesterday’s announced ceasefire holds.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are humans that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them? -Psalm 8

And yet, here we are, cared for, given a home on earth
by the God of mystery—the untamed Spirit of mercy.

The God of white rabbits and weasels and winter trails winding
through scrub poplar, under an evening sky popping with starlight;
and it’s only six o’clock, still long
glorious hours before you’re called inside to bed.

And see how the moon’s mindful light
concedes to a nearby constellation;
an encouragement, little one, to name yourself,
and shine on.

Shine, on the frozen snow squeaking under your felt-lined boots.
Shine on the trail to the dark barn, the warm cows, the work
of your fingers, the volley of steaming milk
hitting the galvanized pail, and the one-eared tabby waiting,
on the calf-pen rail for an arching stream.

Shine, on your cabin retreat, shine on the suet in the bean can
on the veranda, the sudden appearances of juncos and redpolls,
and nuthatches stealing seeds to cache in the crevices of poplar bark,
and a quartet of whisky jacks, their pewter shadows
lengthening in worship under a leafless birch.

Even the frost, building its straight line
along the window pane in the loft, shines
with a mix of moonlight and starlight,
a soft argent caress coming to rest on your silver hair,
your laugh lines, your tear-worn face, your midnight prayer,
your bins full of memories.