Sounds

 

tunnelling, tunnelling,
and no one notices

until the skies

open and the rain falls
and spills down the mineshaft
fills the saltmines,

where the salt

dissolves and crumbles,
100 storeys of it, and the earth
caves into its own ocean.

Circle Dance

 

At the end of the day, a rag-tag bunch of

bedraggled intertribals in a ragged line

curving around the arbour: 

the drums to one side,

we have lost our centre.

 

The half-moon shuffle staggers and bunches,

my sandals stepped on, lapped by a gaggle of kids.

We need a leader to take us through these dark times.

 

The entire dance, the circle never joined,

and this morning the moral arrived:

you can't circle dance if you don't make a circle,

where everyone leads and follows together, 

adapts to each neighbour

to make the circle turn. 

 

All we had to do was join hands.

 

And that same morning I awoke with a joke

distilled in the remnants of dreams:

 

There's a trunk and you're trying to decide

whether to use a key lock or a combination lock.

If a key, you could lose the key; if a combination,

you could forget the combination.

So what's the best solution?

 

Answer:

Thirty years ago, Sandra Stephenson chose Quebec as home.  She was nine, writing small verse when George Bowering invited bill bisset to read at Sir George Williams campus; and 49 when bisset came back to Montreal for Circus of Words / Cirque des mots, and dubbed her Czandra, poetess.  She maintains that social engagement enriches poetry, comparisons impoverish it.