April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

Live with me on Earth among red berries and the bluebirds
And leafy young twigs whispering
Within such little spaces, between such floors of green, such
figures in the clouds
That two of us could fill our lives with delicate wanting:

Where stars past the spruce copse mingle with fireflies
Or the dayscape flings a thousand tones of light back at the
sun—
Be any one of the colours of an Earth lover;
Walk with me and sometimes cover your shadow with mine.
                  (From "Live With Me On Earth Under the Invisible Daylight Moon", Milt Acorn)

The bad...

All green ends up eventually
churning in her left cheek.
Her mouth is a laundromat of spinning drowning herbs.
She is never in fields
but is sucking the pith out of grass.
I have noticed the very leaves from flower decorations
grow sparse in their week long performance in our house.
The garden is a dust bowl.

On our last day in Eden as we walked out
she nibbled the leaves at her breasts and crotch.
But there's none to touch
none to equal
the Chlorophyll Kiss      
                (From "Notes for the Legend of Salad Woman", Michael Ondaatje)

_____________________________________

When you mix the politics of art with Canada you get Ondaatje riding wide-hipped to Ottawa, who's not just the destroyer of haiku but perhaps the country's worst imitator of Atwood leaferies. I do recall the man being snubbed at a Lorine Niedecker centennary not too long ago. Of Acorn, however, of the redberries and birds of Earth eating out of the homeless hand, and of copse perfume and the sun's own thousand shades fluttering in the poet's eye, and of the fires along Spadina Ave and Milt's love of thundering whiskey jacks (a typically Easterner thing!),  I'll always say softly and always in deference to the man's own personal saintliness that it'd be vain and pretentious to talk about anything else here.

May the pure limbs of Acorn lead us all to a true People's Poetry.