To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
1
Jun
2019
This poem was deeply influenced by Chapters 1 and 2 in Diana Butler-Bass’s latest book, Grounded (HarperOne, HarperCollilns, New York 2015). I recommend it.
Dig your hands into the dirt.
Crumble its fibres in your fingers.
Let the grains of humble humus
sift down to holy earth.
The soil is all your relations,
decomposed and recomposed,
the dust and ashes, the legacy
of everything that ever lived.....
Categories: Poetry
Tags: water, Communion, Mass, earth
17
May
I offered you a lake of love
Clear, deep, sun-dancing,
Refreshed by mountain streams.
You waded in up to your ankles,
Then you shook the water off your feet
And dried between your toes.
Tags:
16
Apr
I've had this poem in the works for almost a year. I kept adding bits of description, clarifying metaphors and analogies, fussing with parallels... I couldn't make up my mind whether it was about the church, or politics, or science. I dug it out last week, and started cutting all the preachy stuff. It's up to you, the reader, to decide what it's about.
A rock, rough and rugged.
crashed into a rushing river.
The river pulled back,
waves roiling away from the intruder.
But the river forgave the rock,
wrapped its long blue arms around the newcomer,
hugged it, caressed it, invited it to travel
down to the sea....
Tags: Evolution, Rocks, rivers, erosion
8
Mar
On the coldest day of the coldest month ever recorded here in the Okanagan Valley, I caught myself thinking wistfully about spring. Into my mind popped a vision of dew drops clinging to fresh green grass in the morning sun. If felt so attractive I began writing a poem.
dew drop clings to a spiring stem
spherical lens magnifies
nano-scenes within the grass
shivers in a morning breeze
sun yawns over the eastern rim of the bowl of life
overflows
spilling holiness across
a waking world
Tags: dew dawn grass
Feb
The numbing cold that has swathed most of Canada during February prompted my mind to wander into uncharted territory.
Cold slithers down
from the far side of 60 degrees, latitude.
When it’s that cold,
when tears turn into salt hailstones
when spit ricochets,
the scale doesn’t matter.
But even a polar vortex
retains measurable warmth.
Heat itself ceases
at absolute zero —
on the Kelvin scale, minus 273.15 Celsius —
a temperature beyond which
there is no beyond.