Why I write beginnings
A poem to end the semester.
I repel ants with spice. Prickly cloves, heady sweetness. I don’t know why soft leaves make me think of people. I am moving from one safe harbour to the next, grateful for each. Magdala tasted dry, a beige cap slightly frayed at the Velcro. When the taxi driver circled back for it in a thunderstorm, he wrote an ending. Missing a person is the smallest waiting. Don’t we all remember the voice of dust that whispers fly? I needed my childhood to cost more. The plums I ate were the last ones on the trees. They were soft, so unbearably ready for anything. •
It’s the end of April and the end of the first year of my MFA. (Crazy!) I have an enormous binder of notes and prep work for a poetry class I took this Spring, and this is one of the poems I crafted as part of a “self study.”
All of the lines in this poem are drawn from fragments of journal entries over the past 5 years, with some editing and transition words included. (“Magdala tasted dry” and “a beige cap” were a year apart and on two separate continents – Israel (2022) and Arua, Uganda (2023)) I wrote about a childhood memory of termites – “Don’t we all hear the voice in our ear whispering fly and light?” and chopped that question up. Plums is from a journal entry when I re-entered B.C. in 2024. “Soft leaves / make me think of people” is from a journal entry in Arua, northern Uganda in 2022 and the ants are from a journal entry in Kabale, same year, opposite end of the country.
It won’t surprise any of my regular readers that a sense of place is enormously important in my writing. Here, in A Broken Tulip, I’ve been experimenting with bringing multiple bodies of place into the same piece. Here are a few archived prose poems that centre in place:
Ancient grains
We washed millet, laid it to dry on the trampoline, ground it in a hand-mill. The flour was always too gritty, the seeds too small for our grinding stones, too perfectly smooth and round and whole. Ancient grains, my Mom would say, quoting a health book, and I’d picture the pharaohs and canoes on the Nile and birds dropping the smooth grains through the…
Wrestling certainty
A man tells me that every time he opens the door of another country he finds shadows waiting. He wants his children to have light. Light for breakfast, light for lunch, light for supper.
i love the last couple lines about late plums unbearably ready
Love the process of how this poem came to be — and, of course, the poem itself!