Dawn begs earth
to stay
Through vowel
spirit enters
in consonant the soul
river’s primal speakers
bind breath to flesh to bone.
Grey brittle stars
the small cloven hooves
of morning.
Between the lifting
of the eyelid
and the glance
a speck of dust
descending
arising.
Meister Eckhart says
The creator has no within.
What needs doing gets done somehow
dance doing it beautifully.
The plant oracle says
Nature responds with no arrangement or forced effort.
Richard Therrien has published broadly across North America, from journalism to non-fiction, fiction and poetry. His poetry has been published in various periodicals such as Grain, The New Quarterly and Prairie Fire. He is co-author, with Dean Neu, of Accounting for Genocide, Canada’s Bureaucratic Assault on Aboriginal People (Fernwood Publishing/Zed Books, 2003). Sleeping in Tall Grass, due in the spring of 2016 from University of Alberta Press, is his first collection of poetry.
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