blue skies poetry

The concert goers gather where the earth is slanted 
	sheltered from city lights 
Where the land still grows verdant words
Not slick pavement and glowing machines
	who fear and suffocate poems
The wandering moon fills their refugee mouths
The homeless wind sprinkles a rouge of cosmic
	dust on their skins to magnetize their memories
An orphaned grizzly cub taps his claw three times
	on a firetower woman’s arthritic shoulders
Gray wolves lick Cree words hidden beneath buffalo horns
There are no police with their song and dance
That’s for the birds who punctuate the budding
 	text from their nests and cover any half-naked chicks
Pine beetles spit three times at the evergreens who cough
	and remind all that the word ‘pristine’
	died invisibly in the grey rain long ago
Shadow dinosaurs roar three times then give up their fossils
And as a tired sun rises, it sears the text onto the gathered’s
	soiled bodies
The firetower woman feels the marks in the moist forest
	between her toes, three short–three long–three short
Ask her long the game trail and she will reveal the mountain
	text, the understory of the boreal, a rhizomatic SOS

Vivian Demuth is the author of a poetry collection, Breathing Nose Mountain (Long Shot Productions), and an ecological novel, Eyes of the Forest (Smoky Peace Press). Each summer, she hosts an annual eco-poetry event at Nose Mountain in the boreal forest.

Filed under: Vivian Demuth, Writing the Land by akublik Date 7 September, 2007