Unit 3: Canadian Poetry

Newsreel: Man and Firing Squad - by Margaret Atwood

i
A botched job,
the blindfold slipped, he sees
his own death approaching, says No
or something, his torso jump as the bullets hit
his nerves / he slopes down,
wrecked and not even
cleanly, roped muscles leaping, mouth open
as though snoring, the photography
isn’t good either.

ii
Destruction shines with such beauty
Light on his wet hair
serpents of blood jerked from the wrists
Sun thrown from the raised and lowered
rifles / debris of the still alive
Your left eye, green and lethal

iii
We depart, we say goodbye
Yet each of us remains in the same place,
staked out and waiting,
it is the ground between that moves, expands,
pulling us away from each other.
No more of these closeups, this agony
taken just for the record anyway
The scenery is rising behind us
into focus, the walls
and hills are also important,
Our shattered faces retreat, we might be
happy, who can interpret
the semaphore of our bending
bodies, from a distance we could be dancing

The Red Bird You Wait For – Gwendolyn MacEwen

You are waiting for someone to confirm it,

You are waiting for someone to say it plain,
Now we are here and because we are short of time
I will say it; I might even speak its name.
Unit 3: Canadian Poetry

It is moving above me, it is burning my heart out,

I have felt it crash through my flesh,
I have spoken to it in a foreign tongue,
I have stroked its neck in the night like a wish.

Its name is the name you have buried in your blood,

Its shape is a gorgeous cast-off velvet cape,
Its eyes are the eyes of your most forbidden lover
And its claws, I tell you its claws are gloved in fire.

You are waiting to hear its name spoken,

You have asked me a thousand times to speak it,
You who have hidden it, cast if off, killed it,
Loved it to death and sung your songs over it.

The red bird you wait for falls with giant wings –
A velvet cape whose royal colour calls us kings
Is the form it takes as, uninvited, it descends,
It is the Power and the Glory forever, Amen.

The Mile Runner – Miriam Waddington

You are my buzz my hive you are my honey steeple,

you are my me my how my pray and also prithee,
my mile runner and spinning helicopter,
my rescue from the wilderness of river.

And are you not my this my that of prairie,

my weathered granary my nuisance crow?
My miles of sameness and my endless railway,
my gone-astray my slow unlabeled freight?

So add the fishes’ double-quick of colour,

the while-away of summer’s brazen boys,
the golden eye of lakes the fresh of beaches,
and I’m the eyelid and tongue and I’m the ear.