Enlightenment

Last week one day I was driving home from Burlington on Plains Road and watched a hawk land on one of the roadside light standards. It reminded me of the nearby Hendry Valley portion of the Royal Botanical Gardens, and that I hadn't been there for some time. That same afternoon I set out to the mouth of Grindstone Creek without any specific purpose.

I don't know if it was because the valley was thick with early summer growth of reeds and grasses, the combinations of heat and cool and light and shade, the sudden absence of human and mechanical interaction. I felt a growing awareness of all my surroundings and a wondrous sense of union. Let me explain.

Especially in natural settings I get a feeling of belonging, that the place and time I share with other life (and even non-life such as rock and water and air) is good, is as the Creator meant it to be. I love that feeling and take time to enjoy when it happens. But this was more. And because it was so much more, I have had to spend some time sorting this out in my head, trying to find common language to express the unusual.

Let me try to put it this way. Rather than feeling I belonged in, I felt I was.

Laugh if you must. For the merest instant I was terrified: my being didn't stop at my skin. I was the grasses and sedges around me, the water and frogs at my feet, the trees and calling birds above me. Light flowed like water, no a little more viscous like a pure light oil. The fear didn't last; it was instantly replaced by an intense joy that blocked my usual rational scrutiny.

If anyone had observed me, they might have judged me mad. I know I talked to the trees and the water. I spoke with the birds. For some time I was part of the divine that is all.

The experience is no longer fresh; I don't know if it changed me. This I do know. I have a better understanding of Francis of Assisi, the Spanish mystics, even Vincent Van Gogh. Several poets.

I felt the need to re-read poets like John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and even Allen Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl."

It made me contemplate (again) the reason I write poetry: to instill and share the holiness of everything I see and feel, to show the miraculous in the commonplace. When I receive a comment that shows perhaps I succeeded, I feel that same joy and hope there are more who have been touched in some way by my words.

Birdsong

I've been telling myself to explain the thought process behind the name of this column. The first entry for a new year seems like an opportune time.

It began in the mid-1980s. Around that time I noticed that a number of the poems I was writing dealt with and stemmed from my observation of birds. Eagles, hawks, crows, jays, robins, bluebirds, swallows, sparrows, starlings, gulls, loons, ducks, swans and so on, and so on. I tried to put together a manuscript with the working title In the Words of Singing Birds (but it didn't fly ... ). All punning aside, several of the better poems found other places.

One of those was a little imagist poem entitled "Birdsong." It was first published as an illustration for a "poetry calendar" and later over an image of a perched bird as a People's Poetry Poster. (Ted Plantos)

The poem began when I made a distinct effort to find the Eastern Bluebirds which had become nearly extinct but, with the help of special bird boxes, were making a comeback in the area where I grew up. (Leeds Co., Ontario) I found my first bluebird along a dirt road I had often walked to school, before the one-room schools were amalgamated. The experience moved me greatly and became that poem.

But the poem, though almost minimalist and simple, began to take on, for me, more meaning than I had ever imagined. In time it became for me my poetic statement, a distillation of my personal poetics. Here is the poem:

BIRDSONG

on the rail fence

beside the dirt road

a bluebird

fire on his breast

throws his song

to the sky

in the dust

two little whirlwinds

dance

Now for an explanation, of sorts.

Imagine the bird as the poet, his song as the poems, his means of expression. The bird has two colours, blue and red, and each of these colours has its own connotation. The red is the emotional, the heart-feeling; the blue is the rational, the mind-shaping. The birdsong begins in the breast, in the emotional, and is shaped in the body, the rational, before it is expressed. So too, for me, the poem.

It begins as an emotional action/reaction/observation and then is carefully formulated and shaped in the rational mind. I don't remember ever writing a poem without putting it through several workings and reworkings, no matter how good I thought the first draft was. Then, like the bluebird's song, it leaves to become a separate entity.

The setting also becomes important. It is open country, fields and woods, but touched by some components of human involvement with the fence, the road: a combination therefore of the wild and the civilized. The little dust whirls are also important. You would like to think that they dance as a result of the bird's song and that the poet's expression has direct results outside himself. However, it doesn't matter. The importance is that bluebirds create song and poets create poetry.

So, you see, this place has become for me a space for my inner bluebird to fill with song.

Feel free to listen. And dance.

Winter Haiku

old wooden fence

three inches higher
after the snowfall

*

in my crimson winter coat

I whistle replies
to a cardinal

*

under the weight of snow

the old spruce

a weeping willow

*

first frost

the grass covered

with shattered stars

*

Haiku

I woke up this morning 'under the weather' as they say: stuffed sinuses, runny nose, a bit of a dry cough. The thing is, my cough reminded me of a strange sound I had heard early one summer morning when the smog turned the sky a gray-tan colour and the sun a bloody red. I had to dig up the haiku I wrote then and put aside.

a new smog alert
..........the rising sun is greeted
................................by a coughing crow

Somehow this one fell into an automatic 5-7-5 form. I don't usually write that way; Japanese ideograms are not equal to English syllables. The art in English language haiku is to convey all that needs to be conveyed in as few words as possible, to keep to the spirit of haiku rather than labour under the restrictions of form.