Two new poems: "Climate" and "On finding a stone..."

 

 I have been fortunate enough to have two poems published this week. Oddly enough, they were both accepted during the same week back in February, and they appeared in publication only two days apart.

The first one, "Climate,"  appears in Stone Circle Review, a lovely new journal run single-handedly by editor Lee Potts.

I started writing this poem during one of the many gloomy, rainy days we had this past winter. (Did you know this was Ontario's darkest winter in over 80 years?) It began as more of a gripe than anything else, but the process of writing it really got me thinking about the bigger picture of what is happening to our planet.

Here's the first bit of the poem:

I hate winter rain, how it soaks
dirty snow heavy, sluices beneath ice
dams at the curb, how it seeps,
weighs....

(read the whole poem HERE)

 

  image courtesy of Stone Circle Review

 

The second of the two is called "On finding a stone to put in your father's casket" and appears in River Mouth Review. It's very fitting that it was published so close to the one-year anniversary of Dad's death. My brother Errol and I were the ones tasked with the stone-finding mission the morning of Dad's funeral; it's something I will never forget.

Here are the first few lines:

Morning of the funeral, you drive out
to the farm. Best not to disturb

the new owners, also the lane
is muddy and rutted, so you pull in

off the road...

(read the whole poem HERE)

 

image courtesy of River Mouth Review
(this is not the stone we picked up at the farm)