When everything was expanding,
blowing out of proportion,
I found you.
No daily hour of pain.
Discipline brings results,
not agony.
A small discomfort yielding huge reward,
and a glimmer of hope.
.
.
poem-anniversary July 25, 2016
It has been one year
without you.
I could take off mourning now,
remove a black cloak of outward grief,
but I will never remove the sense of loss.
It has been one year
without you,
but I still hear your voice
I hear your laugh,
your bad jokes,
another repetition of your life story.
I could take off a mourning cloak
but I will wear you on my shoulder,
hear you in my ears,
love you with every breath
until we meet again.
.
https://shawnbird.com/2015/07/25/obituary-herbert-mosses-duguay/
poem-summer July 24, 2016
Hot day.
The mall is packed.
Swimming lessons need a driver
(kids can’t get anywhere by themselves, after all).
Joggers sweating past.
Gas mower chugs obnoxiously around the yard.
I miss the soft swisha-swisha of dad’s old Rotary mower
when summer was gentler
and filled with children’s laughter.
poem-dance me July 23, 2016
May have this dance,
owed from fifth grade?
Embrace memory
And wistful wishes.
.
.
Paper Town. John Greene.
poem-aftermath July 21, 2016
A hundred years ago these fields yielded
grief, fear, bodies, blood, and mud.
Now, wheat dries golden in the sun,
leaves wave in the breeze over crater scars,
While the earth returns bones and bombshells
to the surface: a century of slowly expulsing the detritus of war
extruding shrapnel from its pockmarked body with the new grass.
.
.
Watching the history channel, and amazed to learn that even today, Belgian farmers keep bins in their yards for unexploded shells they find, and the army comes by regularly to collect and destroy them. What a legacy a hundred years later! I’m just finishing Anne Perry’s World War One series which has made trench warfare very vivid.
poem-searching July 19, 2016
I’m searching for you
street after street,
household after household.
Your entire block has vanished,
uncountable mystery.
.
.
(I’ve just spent 2 days combing 2000 entries in the 1921 Montreal census in search of the block where my father lived. I can’t find it in any of the districts, though I have found addresses within 5 mins walk in all directions. It’s like they forgot to enumerate his neighbourhood. So frustrating!).
poem-circled July 15, 2016
Once pain and loneliness was devoured
in hamburgers, milkshakes, and pasta.
But she wanted love, and she imagined
love came to the lithe more easily.
So she huffed and puffed and starved and carved
batted her eyes and bagged a boy.
But life means sacrifice and imperfection
and lack of twenty four hour adoration were devoured
in grilled cheese sandwiches, chocolate and pies,
until her perfect image was compromised by
becoming oversized. Never her fault of course,
bilious and blaming others for her bitterness
She huffed and puffed and starved and carved
and when the right size was realized, and devised an escape,
climbed into bed after bed until one was willing to buy
more permanent access: a perfect lie.
Objective achieved once more bilious gases expand
The desperate, devouring girl pretends to have fun,
a reality show with an audience that’s blind and dumb.
Whatever the social media illusion that feeds our delusion,
eventually we must face the conclusion of our own prostitution.
What do we sell ourselves for?
poem-stormy July 14, 2016
Lightning has sliced the sky
forced apart air until the earth
is shaking with fear of it.
poem-universe July 13, 2016
The universe conspires to send us messages.
Warm greetings from those who’ve gone ahead
Into the vast unknown, and we receive their love
and keep them alive in memory.
Shawn L. Bird 