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From the archives

A Tragedy of Our Own

The Air India bombing and how we live with the past

Playing the Rights Card

A history of Canadian foreign policy as domestic theatre

Two Other Solitudes

The India-Canada relationship has taken a long time to develop

 

Outside my window,

in the parking lot of the Arabic grocery store,

a hundred seagulls assemble

to avoid the sharpshooting wind off the highway.

The clouds are low down and on the offensive.

 

Hup two, three, four. Hup two, three, four.

The cockiest male struts

like a colonel among troops

crowded into a pair of yellow-chalked

military zones. He’s talking strategy.

He’s talking peace in the Middle East.

Just as I’m thinking “air strike,”

a rogue flock descends, breaks my concentration

and the colonel’s —

 

but commotion or no,

still nothing here but the blinking cursor

where a poem should’ve been.

Still nothing but me,

reading metaphors into everything,

time being a luxury I can afford.

Taking it, kneading it, stretching it out.

And why deprive myself?

I like my wily council of birds.

I like that they come to see me now and again.

What else can I do, a writer who writes all day,

my entire studio hemorrhaging light?

 

The sun beats down

with an exaggerated sense of importance,

 

— because there aren’t any sweet-eyed kids

scampering sweaty and barefoot

through the kitchen. There are no unmade beds,

no rumpled towels on the bathroom floor.

There’s no husband,

no dog or cat to care for.

No caged, smart-mouthed parrot slung over a lake

of its own droppings.

 

It glows this way because it can.

Carolyn Marie Souaid is the Montreal-based author of six books of poetry and editor of over a dozen. She has toured her work across Canada, Europe and the United States, and has been shortlisted for a number of literary awards including the A.M. Klein Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. In 2012, her videopoem, Blood Is Blood, won a prize at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. In 2013, she was awarded a seven-week writer’s residency at The Banff Centre to work on a novel. Her newest poetry book, This World We Invented, will appear from Brick Books in 2015.

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