Written Word

The Glassblowers - George Sipos
The Way Light Enters This World - Lorraine Gane
Blind Faith - Joanne Bealy
untitled - Cherie Geauvreau
Teal - Diana Hayes
Face to Face - Evelyn C. White

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THE GLASSBLOWERS

                              No chance now
to remember more than incident light

fragments glimpsed through a basement window
where torches hissed gas and glass glowed
yellow and plastic, bulbed
with the breath of people who did not matter,
only the beauty they shaped
from air and fire

Someone else elsewhere
painted the ornaments with mercury,
delivered them sparkling to our eyes
so we could see more clearly how
light transcends matter
and how this imperfect earth is a passage only --
whatever stars we dreamt at Christmas
mere pinpricks in the empyrean

No chance for us or for them
to redeem such antique innocence:
           the wonders we breathed,
           or the vapours that they did
and that killed them
Too late now to put away childish things,
our blood thick with the miracles
of light, a mad residuum of flame
we can’t undo

                       only remember
that once we saw glass cool on a basement bench,
heat and colour fading into a slow transparency,
not humming spheres but charred wood,
            dirt on the window,
            a smell of scorched sand

the dark solidity of the world seen through glass,
everything visible damned and blessed
into light

George Sipos

 

THE WAY LIGHT ENTERS THIS WORLD

Dark clouds in every direction
but the island before us arched in rainbow light,
one side of the strait to the other.
From the top deck the light grows into my eyes,
wind hard on our faces
till we move behind glass and steel.

Awe is salve that will heal our eyes,
messages encoded in fern, cedar, sky,
the way light enters this world and is gone
from our eyes yet lingers still,
like these violets, greens, browns, yellows
I see now, six colors in all.

“Light passes through a curtain of rain,’’ you say,
“prisms hold seven colors in their rays,’’
questions of the heart answered
without knowing the questions,
your face washed in softness,
and what grows still and wide in this light
lives at the apex of our breath as we stand here together,
warmth of your arm against mine,
green shores drawing closer, last sheen of violet fading.

Lorraine Gane

 

BLIND FAITH

When a thick mist
              (or even a driving rain)

lowers a veil
              over the cedar standing sentry,

I trust
              the hiding
                           is temporary.

I trust
              the tree
                           has not moved
                                        or disappeared.

There is no immediate
              proof,
                           only this crazy belief

that all
             is as it was,
             as it is,
             as it was
             meant to be.

Joanne Bealy

 

red moon asks you
to see her charm beyond
silver & lace
she asks your
blood to breathe
back to her
one vapour’s trace
upon the glass

Cherie Geauvreau

 

TEAL

A certain breed of grass in Spring, on the edge of prairie
under late day’s light

A memory that persists beyond age and reason, beyond lapses
we blame on our body’s weariness or distraction

A light that grows roots in the dark, lifts nightmares
from the heart’s eye, ushering grace and music

Mysterious, always elusive, not blue or green
not melancholy or envious

A good day at sea, the light bouncing from waves
southern horizon, sand an invisible distance away

The Irish rock, the rose crystal’s half-brother
the lake that swallowed the mountain

Diana Hayes

 

FACE TO FACE

Beulah. Caledonia. Mammy. The names evoke images of Black women who (usually head-wrapped and rotund) played the role of maid, servant or housekeeper in multitudes of Hollywood movies. One day last summer, I’d completed my shopping at Ganges Village Market. My partner beside me, I exited through the market’s glass doors and basked in the rays of sunshine that immediately warmed my face. A few steps away from our car in the parking lot of GVM, Joanne and I were stopped by a middle-aged white woman. “Would you two happen to know any house cleaners?” the woman queried, a hopeful look in her eyes. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it, and I soundly agree: “There is honour in all labour.” Still, I know it was my brown-skinned, dreadlocked visage that prompted the woman to ask if “we” could direct her to someone proficient with mop, dish rag, vacuum cleaner, toilet brush and broom. “No,” we darkly replied.

Evelyn C. White

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All writings © 2008 by the writer