Poetry soothes the soul. But as the balladeers of the past roamed from town to town singing their songs, so must poetry be shared. I invite you to share your own poetry with me, and I will post it here.
It is fitting that the first poem on this page should be one written in honor of the waters sailed by my father, and later by my husband and me. The North Channel Islands along the southern coast of Canada in northern Lake Huron are pristine and diverse.
Sailing down Baie Fine
Huron's North Channel
Writer's Digest Award winner, 2010.
A thousand islands tossed on an inland sea —
timeless, mysterious, and solitary.
Indians and French and English
All sought hegemony and lost
to isolation and nature’s whim.
Yet, names abide to acknowledge their attempt ―
Killarney and La Cloche and Kagawong,
from an Ojibwa song of a waterfall’s mist.
Baie Fine exults as a continent’s sole fjord.
And the Pool puddles at its feet,
a respite for sailors who seek sweet solace.
Atop a hill, a crystalline basin beckons.
Its mystical waters, magnetic.
If you dare a dive, an ice-blue sluice
at once defies and affirms life.
The Benjamins ―
islands that claim kinship with Ulysses’ shores.
On a rose-tinged pillow, a Siren’s sister serenades,
enticing mariners onto menacing shoals.
The Group of Seven: Carmichael and Varley,
Lismer and MacDonald, Harris, Jackson and Johnston
Artists who vied to capture the grandeur
in oranges and reds and greens with pigment and canvas.
If portraits fail,
can mere words contain the essence
of a thousand islands tossed on an inland sea?
Perhaps…
But, only for a moment.
Dainty Oxalis perched royally
Weeds
The broadleaf sprout spoils sweet earth
Defying the spade that would destroy it.
The Dandelion spreads its evil.
Aureate buttons leap wildly ‘cross rippling lea,
Succumb to crowns of gray, and then the rapture ─
Wondrous flightlings dazzling all who see.
Beware the wild flora and its sinful portends.
A dainty Oxalis perched royally on a shamrock cushion.
A buttercup to forecast love,
But its taste, sour on the tongue of a child.
An arrow-leafed Bindweed, reminiscent of Cupid’s dart,
Lacy vines entwined in grace for a single day,
Until Elysium calls them home.
I once lay at peace on verminous acres of creams and lilacs,
Watching cirrus form cumulus, then nimbus.
Bees humming arias midst bovine meditation,
Delight suffusing clover-strewn meadows.
Who chooses the language of blossoms and of weeds,
The invited and the uninvited, the chaste and the unchaste?
Who decides which to call handsome and which will rob your acres of its beauty?
Who decides a weed is a weed?