Post 6 from Emily Deming, Mallard Cottage’s Writer-in Residence, St. John’s Newfoundland
I took last week off from daily work and home-life to be both horribly sick and to celebrate a friend’s fortieth birthday in Montreal. Since I last posted, Newfoundland has had an unprecedented run of sunny weather, a rallying in mass rage at an announced austerity budget (which heavily and regressively taxes the lower income brackets), and a massive four day long provincial liquor store clearance sale.
With this backdrop, I was fulfilling the pledge from my previous post to walk to and from work in order to take some time each day to notice all of what I have around me here in St. John’s, and I found two poems. A flick-flick of pink by the lake’s edge caught my attention. We may have had some extra sun, but we certainly don’t have leaves or flowers yet (other than a few crocuses that make us all lose our minds each April). Two poems, each printed on pink cotton fabric squares were clothespinned to bare branches.
The last few lines of one did just what a poem should and stuck with me, repeating itself to the cadence of my feet as I walked the rest of the way home.
“...that in the waking edge of rage
we are still beautiful
wild and with a special grace”.
The smell of the Mallard Cottage smoker, the feel of the fog on my skin as it settled down the slopes beneath a blue sky, and the alders just soft with fuzz like pussy willows, which I had never seen like that before, did something to my eyes, my mind, the things around me: the gulls above Her Majesty’s (moldy, crumbling, overcrowded) Penitentiary; the razor wire wall between the blue sky and the graveyard; the color palettes of peeling paint around the boathouse docks; a blue buoy in the water.
One morning at Mallard Cottage, a serving of their house pickled salted herring, two hours of good writing accomplished, and that anonymous gift of bold pink poems, and everything had meaning.
The budget is still ruinous, the best of the liquor clearance has been bought up, and I doubt the sun will be that bold through the fog again for a week, but there is no way to be bored in the world when armed with a drop of poetry. To remind myself of that, I captured a few video clips of the lake water lapping and the wind and gulls. Each ten second scene is a small meditation and a call back to how clear things can look on “... the waking edge of rage”
And in honour of our collective crazy spring auge, here is one more poem I “found” this week by a very young poet in Vermont who so beautifully and succintly captured that moment of first crocus sighting after the plow-slush and freeze and driving snow of winter, regardless of how cold the wind remains:
A Springtime Poem
By Elizabeth E. Daley (age 5 at time of composition)
Walking with my sister,
I find the first small, purple flowers in bloom.
My heart pops with joy!
Spring has come!
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