blue skies poetry

it’s night when the convoy arrives
bringing expatriates from Wood Buffalo Park, Alberta;
plains bison, returning to bald Saskatchewan prairie
they’d once shared with the First Nations

71 ornery, wild-eyed hump-backed dinosaurs
wearing capes of tangled wiry wool

moonlight swathes the prairie in silvery blue;
a small crowd waits, to greet, to celebrate

they are all released at once
spectators reacting with the wonderment
of viewing Halley’s comet
as 71 members of the family Bovidae
explode into the landscape
incising the prairie stillness like a thunderstorm

the drumming of 284 hooves galloping away then
across hardscrabble range, churning up dense dust
as the silver-blue darkness swallows them,
the great flat unknown presenting no threats
nor ambiguities whatsoever to revenants such as these

~ Don Mulcahy

Don Mulcahy was born in Clydach, Wales. He became a Canadian citizen in 1969 and now lives in Strathroy, Ontario. He writes poetry and prose following an academic career in dentistry. He has previously been published in professional journals, The Edmonton Journal, the CHS Newsletter (Wales), The Prairie Journal, Matrix, Coffee House Poetry (U.K.), iota (U.K.), Verse Afire, fait accomplit, blood ink, Tower Poetry, the Antigonish Review, and the anthologies Butterfly Thunder and Ascent Aspirations, Spring 2008 edition. He is currently seeking a publisher for a 59-author immigration anthology and for a poetry collection titled Existence Theory and 127 Other Poems. He founded the new Strathroy Writers’ Group in 2007. He also paints, having held a one-man show at the Strathroy-Caradoc Public Art Gallery for the month of August 2007.

Filed under: Don Mulcahy by akublik Date 25 February, 2008