Poems in Response to Peril: Our First Responders
Poems in Response to Peril: First Responders to Our Call
On Saturday, April 2 2022 at 2 p.m. EDT, https://www.rsitoski.com/event-details/poets-in-response-to-peril/. Please join us as we bring together poets from all over in a special Oh!Sound National Poetry Month online celebration of poetry in response to precarious events in the world. See Penn's blog here to read how they have responded, and join us to hear them in person. Our message to Ukraine from poets standing in solidarity:
Poems in Response to Peril
Chapbook Editor: Penn Kemp
Video Editor: Richard-Yves Sitoski
In his famous elegy for W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden says, “poetry makes nothing happen.” And he adds: “it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” Penn Kemp and Susan McCaslin reflected on this in light of the current situation in Ukraine. McCaslin writes: “On Feb. 24, 2022, when the world woke to the shock of the catastrophic bombing of Ukraine, I asked myself and a few of my fellow poets how they would respond to Auden’s words, especially in these perilous times.”
Do you have a poem in response to peril? Send it to pennkemp@gmail.com asap. Deadline March 24. Send an attachment of no more than two pages, with a one line bio at bottom.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Our First Responders: Table of Contents
Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni, Manna
Robert Girvan, When My Words Ring
Heidi Greco, Finding hope
Diana Hayes, The Space Between Words
Diana Hayes, After the Storm
Penn Kemp, Kind of Intimate
Penn Kemp, Arms And The Boy
Susan McCaslin, Dark Madonna
R L Raymond, The old house
Murray Reiss, Gross Domestic Product
Murray Reiss, Hundred Different Ways
Richard-Yves Sitoski, AK-47
Jennifer Wenn, Kaleidoscope for the Invasion of Ukraine
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Manna
We cry for bread
And you give us stones.
These are the words in the desert
where the wind blows sand into
everything
Walking in a long line
under the blazing sun
mirages shimmer
till we disappear
bent in the refracted light
Time has no significance here.
Was there ever a roof over our heads,
a home with tapestry and carpets
from the wedding feast,
and a new life started,
vibrant with hope?
A mouth gritty with dust
cannot swallow
cannot speak, nor kiss,
nor even pray
Can any kind of god
hear these whispers and groans?
We cry for bread
And you give us…bombs.
Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni came to Toronto from Pennsylvania to study literature at U of T. She married and stayed in Canada, where she edited 3 anthologies of Italian Canadian writing and has published 4 collections of her poetry.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
When My Words Ring
I am in a child’s smile.
A well-tended garden.
The happy fatigue at day’s end.
In the struggles of normal life, in peace.
I am in random emails, freely written.
In the clash of thoughts, or a poet’s
searching’s, in expression of any kind,
and in every act not coerced.
I was at the hospital in Mariupol that day,
when the bombs hit, and the sky
fell to death. Though the wasteland
grows, I will not be dead.
I live hidden in the heart, there,
and in the street-prisons of Moscow,
Beijing, and every-where else
that freedom does not ring.
I rise anew. I fall, then rise again.
I cannot be broken or shackled.
I am always in danger but never slain.
Those who seek shall find my abode.
I spoke at Gettysburg that day:
All are created equal. Government
of the people, by the people, for the people,
Shall not perish from the earth.
I’m born where freedom meets law
and justice, and bring the gift of peace.
My name is liberty. I am forever young.
When my words ring, prison walls tremble.
Robert Girvan has published poems, essays, book reviews, and the book, Who Speaks for the River? He has written a novel about Cézanne’s last days, The Sleep of the Earth. He worked many years as a Crown Attorney and defence lawyer in Toronto.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Finding hope
This morning I am feeding the birds, replenishing
supplies in the little cracked saucer, the one that’s sheltered
on the window ledge all winter again.
I’m filling it with seeds, still tight in their shells,
ones I hope the birds will disperse, carrying them
far and beyond—sunflowers that will rise up
from the broken earth. I am putting my faith
in their sturdy resilience, counting on them to grow tall
and turn their golden faces to the sun.
Heidi Greco lives on territory of the Semiahmoo First Nation in Surrey, BC, where she has not given up on her efforts to save at least a few of the trees which keep falling to development.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
The Space Between Words
Poems connect us.
They are ambassadors
when grief blinds us
when joy takes our breath away,
when memories visit in the night
and don’t leave a name.
Poems are rhythms of peace
in a world of ancient battles.
They offer refuge from the front lines
when there is little to believe or trust.
They offer a map to the heart
a path otherwise lost.
And finally, poems are followed by silence
the space between words
the knowing that cannot be told with language.
Diana Hayes: “’The Space Between Words’ is an excerpt, previous published in in book Labyrinth of Green, Plumleaf Press, 2019
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
AFTER THE STORM
Did the animals know
in early morning light
the day before winter’s longest night
that everything would change,
the quiet creeping closer—
and where did they hide when
their dens and nests tumbled
inside and upside down?
We heard the cries in tandem
avoiding death by an inch
century-old trees toppled
shredding the earth
where we had just stood.
Second-growth windthrows
unprepared to brace
against a rogue storm
strangers to nor ‘westers
blowing in from a battle sky.
My romance with this forest
in ruins while I grieve
the upturned roots
and uprooted histories
tossed over and around—
the new light invited
but not yet born.
I walk old trails now
between broken limbs and boughs
crisscrossed and tangled,
the wind settling to a light breeze
memory dogging my steps
along the verge of silence.
“My poem “After the Storm” was written for “Poetry of Witness”, a workshop by Lorraine Gane on 12 February 2022. Then, on 24 February 2022, the unthinkable attack on Ukraine was launched by Russian forces. How nature tells us what we need to know: nothing will be the same unless we can find peace between nations and restore the land for its people.”
Diana Hayes has six books out, www.dianahayes.ca. Since 1981, she has lived on Salt Spring—traditional and unceded territory of Hul’q’umi’num’ and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Kind of Intimate
What could be more intimate than
constant streaming on our screens,
images plastered on the occipital
nerve, imprinted, planted, permanent?
What more intimate than a deep love
roping in family, friends, and foreign
faces on the Web to our known orbit?
In the knowledge that we are all one
multi-armed huge beast we call humanity.
backed for or against, wholly, alone.
What could be more intimate than
a marriage under siege, the bride’s
bouquet between her and him in
camouflage, weapons at the ready?
A sharp pang of metal piercing flesh,
the rude intrusion of steel into bone.
Sounds haunting the bloodstream
linger along what once were halls
of the bombed maternity hospital,
children still under the walls, not to
speak of infants, mothers in labour.
What more intimate than the time
when thought coalesces into form
between pen and paper, text onto key
board? Before words arise and fall
in place, the sacred alphabet arranged
just so in orderly progression that never
before has taken shape, as the poem is
birthed? Its aftermath, crimson placenta
of relief, grief given way to gratitude
that something remains while entire
civilizations collapse and fall. The fall
resounding rings hollow down our ears.
In our time and beyond, throughout
the barriers of history being broken,
the current kind of intimate intimidates
us not into submission—but to action.
Penn Kemp’s video reading of this poem:
This poem was commissioned by the League of Canadian Poets for National Poetry Month 2022 on the theme of Poetry and Intimacy.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Let us remember and respond as well to the many other crises ongoing in Sudan, Syria, Somalia, Myanmar and Congo: https://www.rescue.org/article/top-10-crises-world-cant-ignore-2022. And then there is climate change…
Arms And The Boy
In our time all the world’s worst
clichés are actualised in stark paradox,
explosive irony.
I am swimming in happiness
rain cocooning my window pane
when TV presents unfriendly fire
dropping smart bombs far-off.
I fall through the scream as if to land
among proud and elegant peoples
divided by civil, uncivil arms.
Dispossessed of the West they thought they knew,
dis/oriented, where do they turn?
Women and men cleaving, cleft, bereft.
City institutions crack under cloud cover.
The clans, the earth, rent in spring rain.
Shovels at a narrow grave.
The image that struck me most
was a fourteen-year-old boy,
just skin and bones. The men were
burying him when
crossed, his last gesture,
an ache up arms’ inner
two tears ran down his cheeks.
That boy survived but cannot speak.
Language is lost in war, though lies thrive.
London poet, playwright and performer Penn Kemp: news on www.pennkemp.weebly.com, https://gapriotpress.com/archive/penn-kemp-sharon-thesen-ps and…
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Dark Madonna
For decades you graced the icon corner
just to the left of my desk
crowning all other images.
Dear dark Madonna, luminant flux,
charged words fall from your eyes
gazing simultaneously in and out
spilling nurturance, compassion.
Still, you tenderly clutch the gold-clad child
whose cheek touches yours.
Till now I never knew your provenance,
but when the bombs began falling on Ukraine
I discovered your story.
Unownable lady of disputed ownership,
a 12th-century gift from Byzantium to Kyiv,
too soon taken to Vladimir, Russia
then Moscow, then appropriated by Stalin, Yeltsin.
Now damaged, restored, confined,
you languish in Tolmachi
Abiding in liminal spaces
holding your Ukrainian children close to your breast
in a bombed out maternity ward
you wonder what the days will bring –
dirges, sunflowers, another diaspora,
the transience of time’s cycles
holding old horrors, new openings?
Susan McCaslin is a poet living near Fort Langley, BC who has published 16 volumes of poetry, including Heart Work (Ekstasis) and her Selected Poems, Into the Open (Inanna).
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Gross Domestic Product
Corporations scour the Arctic
for natural resources—
zinc and copper, nickel,
lead—her whole hoarded mineral wealth
to be ripped from the thawing earth
and shipped to China
and I can't help but think of the gold
pried loose
from my grandfather's teeth, the hair
yanked free
from my grandmother's scalp,
the fat they rendered
from my cousin's plump tuchus.
Never again—we promise each other
after every new debauch
and might even mean it, for that moment,
but we don't know how
to stop, dear Planet,
we are sore in need of help.
Could you round up a few
of your closest friends,
sit us down, lock the doors,
seal the windows, and stage
an intervention
on our behalf?
Oh. You already did?
The floods, the hurricanes,
wildfires, droughts? —
Oh. You already did.
Murray Reiss, from Cemetery Compost, Frontenac House Poetry, 2016)
Hundred Different Ways
There's a hundred different ways to get rich off rape
get some dynamite and blast some dozers & scrape
the tops off mountains to get at the coal
when you're done leave nothing but a gaping hole
shovel all the rubble in the valley down below
and when you walk away with your wallet full of dollars
leave nothing behind for the people in the hollers
but flooded homes poisoned streams
blackened lungs and shattered dreams.
Yeah a hundred different ways to get rich off rape
raise a chainsaw army sharpen every tooth
spit out chips of tamarack fir and spruce
grab your dragline buckets and turn them loose
on what's left of the roots the moss and peat
then gouge a pit thirty stories deep
to get at the tar sands oil that seeps
from the Earth herself black tears she weeps
at the mercury lakes you leave behind
the arsenic and lead her children find
in the fish they catch in the moose they eat
in the water they drink in the air they breathe.
Yeah a hundred different ways to get rich off rape
if you got the balls to do whatever it takes
place your bets and raise the stakes
penetrate gouge and excavate
drill and bomb and detonate
and don't hesitate to mutilate
every wetland forest mountain or stream
gets in between you and your dreams
stands in the way of your machines
frustrates your latest Ponzi scheme
to get rich.
Murray Reiss is an award-winning poet, and Climate Action Performance Poet, from Salt Spring Island BC.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
The old house
She has memorized the walls
crouched in the dust of this tiny room
the patina of fear and isolation
nearly scrubbed from the moldings
with grains of sand and a sliver of broken glass
She hurries to record the details -
why the paint is chipped from the frame
why the mouseprints
in the dirt
only travel one way
If the ogre opens the door
she will hide the broken hourglass
palmed from a high shelf
she will obscure the work with her body -
the past stories not quite retold
***
She hopes that dinner will be late
that the stale bread
tepid water and chocolate long chalky
will wait a little longer
so she can write their final chapter
Then when the ogre opens the door
and she is done
and she has strength
she will throw the last handful of sand
and chips of glass into its dying eyes and run
She has memorized the walls
she has retold the stories of those who came before
her footprints in the dunes will travel one way
her own weakened voice will swell
with the triumph of a collective escape
An Imagist, R L Raymond tells stories through fiction, poetry, and photography. He earned his M.A. in English from Western University and has been published around the world in journals and hallways, on a bus and a few postcards: www.RLRaymond.com.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
AK-47
the radio is on
loaded and cocked
news doesn't ricochet
when fired point blank
we hit the deck
already down
when the same bullet stops
in 44 million hearts
who learn that grief
at 16 grams
is the heaviest thing
in the world
Here is the video of this poem:
.
Richard-Yves Sitoski is a songwriter, performance poet, and the 2019-2022 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound, Ontario. He is also the Interim Artistic Director of the Words Aloud festival. He is curating videos of poems for our project and hosting https://www.rsitoski.com/event-details/poets-in-response-to-peril/.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Kaleidoscope for the Invasion of Ukraine, February 24 2022
A murderous despot festers at one end of a ridiculously long table, his sycophants huddled at the other.
Tanks grind and clank through the mist.
“Russian warship go fuck yourself.”
An obliterated fuel depot shatters the night.
Utter chaos at train platforms leading away from the shells, bombs and missiles.
One man blocks a moving tank, pushes on it with his hands, and kneels in front of it.
Families and pets jam into a subway station-become-bomb shelter.
An unexploded missile nose down through the pavement.
“The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”
A school with a gaping hole blown through the wall.
Still-smoking wrecked Russian vehicles, bodies splayed alongside on the road and a teddy bear mascot from a distant home cowers in the dirt and debris.
Young adults march in protest in Moscow despite assurance of arrest or beating or both.
A flattened apartment block reduced to dust and rubble.
A mother comforts her disabled daughter in a basement.
Orphaned toddlers hole up with their caregivers in another basement.
A Ukrainian man protests in front of Russian soldiers, a crack, he crumples.
A grandmother armed with Googled instructions prepares Molotov cocktails in her back yard.
A man climbs onto a moving Russian tank to defiantly wave a Ukrainian flag.
A very elderly survivor of the siege of Leningrad protests in St. Petersburg with her homemade signs and is bundled off to jail.
Ukrainian mothers pray for their combat-bound sons and knit camouflage netting.
At a border railway station a phalanx of baby strollers bestowed by Polish mothers awaits fleeing refugees.
A mother and her two children run to cross a road, a missile streaks in and explodes, all three fall dead.
A murderous despot festers at one end of a ridiculously long table, his sycophants huddled at the other.
Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer from London, Ontario. She has published her first poetry chapbook, A Song of Milestones (Harmonia Press) and in many journals. https://jenniferwennpoet.wixsite.com/home