Artword Artbar launch of James Deahl's In A Springtime Instant: Selected Poems of Milton Acorn

 

I was exceedingly happy to have been asked to be one of the reader's at yesterday's Artword book launch of James Deahl's Milton Acorn: In A Springtime Instant and Michael Mirolla's The House on 14th Avenue. The Artword Artbar in Hamilton, ON is (and always will be) the favourite venue for poetry happenings like this. James Deahl was a gracious host who introduced speakers, read from his edited Acorn work and provided us with many interesting poetico-biographical details of Canada's great People's Poet. Michael Mirolla, distinguished publisher of Guernica Press in Toronto, chose Hamilton as the first of three places to launch his new collection of verses.

 Readers were each asked to pick two poems of Acorn's and two of their own. Below are the pieces I chose, pairing Acorn's worship and moon poems (the first two below) with my own:

"What I Know of God"

What I know of God is this:
That He has hands, for He touches me.
I can testify to nothing else;
Living among many unseen beings
Like the whippoorwill I'm constantly hearing
But was pointed out to me just once.

Last of our hopes when all hope's past
God, never let me call on Thee
Distracting myself from a last chance
Which goes just as quick as it comes;
And I have doubts of Your omnipotence.
All I ask is... Keep on existing
Keeping Your hands. Continue to touch me.

"Live with Me on Earth under the Invisible Daylight Moon"

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.

____________________________

HYMN

 

Lord, rove with me through chancy days

Where’er You go the pampas waist-high rise,

and souls  kick hard as the tree-reft jays

Crocus God! forgive me what I’ve been,

seeming witless, tossed in fields of delice—

where hearts are bad, & the grounds green

But that’s why night’s a Dawn in disguise,

why You are praised, argent-bright,

seized spiraling  in autumn’s glaucous skies

LA LUNA NON È SIMPATICA

A shimmer in eel grass is

all you really are—
  September freak!

                                    See

the toothy eye

look back at me and
  how she snorts and trails
day
after wearying day: see
the long leggy drag
  of hers

She’s eye-bald and all that,

too,
  a dragon tower rising
a good long time over this, that—
  cold magical power

Thanks to the shiny clasps

  loosed on
a full and formless night,
  anyone can see right
   thru her!

She’s a cool moon!

   Notable’s her work

(she’s the sail to my lone ship
  on a two-thirds sea!):

she’s a triple crown worn low,

  a heart-gusher, as well
as a kind of pale sun spun round &
                                          round!

 Like the steam-breathing roes,

  lying numb struck,
without quinoa, without passion,
  

I love her & run myself hard with it,

  from dale to brook
  east and west
 

By the hands I need to feel with,

  I feel my jacinth queen!
 

So lives the heart, at times

  seeing the edges
of a rotund eel-grass moon ,
 & two cruel hooks
 

 for hacking at quinoa & at me 

Picture taken by Wilma Seville