Mount Edith Cavell Suite
1
Ice Age rolls in hard-hatted driving a bulldozer,
provokes rock-slides as She rams, dislodges,
scoops up and deposits at whim huge stone chunks,
shakes and shoves boulder-sized pieces of mountain.
2
She the mighty frozen one flies high
spans ridges forty meters deep, wears Angel wings.
From engorged tips thunders down avalanches as
her pelvis roars and throbs.
3
Sun follows Her, faithfully returns returns returns
shines on over summits melts snow slow-snakes
running water down mountain flanks.
4
And here and here and here still She sifts
sifts and shuffles more snow sifts it like flour
in the bowl of her great dream.
Then like a drunken cantankerous gambler
She shakes the die again and again, lusts after the windfall.
Like a rock hound she rattles her tumbler
clunk on clunk, dry dead thuds, as stumbling stones
grind and crush rock rock rock
rockrockrocks to silt as splash washes washes.
5
Sun stoops to Her, nibbles glacier’s toe,
rises and kisses her forehead, sculpts ice caves,
caresses with breath her skin, makes perfect aqua waves
transmutes iceberg shapes with his lavish sensuous
tongue, fills her round pool.
Ice recedes.
~ Pierrette Requier
Pierrette Requier was raised in the village of Donnelly. Although she has spent most of her adult life in Alberta’s capital city, she has always remained aware of having been fundamentally influenced and formed by having lived in the large spaces of the North where her grandparents on both sides came to settle as pioneers in the Peavine Creek area. She has regularly needed to return ‘home’ to all that flat space and the boreal forest for renewal and restoration, yet thinks that there is something that remains untamed and defies naming about thisland, thus writing the land always feels tentative, almost impossible, a larger than life task. Requier has been involved in the Edmonton Stroll of Poets Society for fifteen years, as well as the Tangent Lines spoken word group. She also facilitates Wind Eye Poetry Seminars.
I liked the alliteration and pops of internal rhyme, made this feel spoken word.
thanks for this.