dream of the Neolithic hunter
imagine you are running with the hunt --
moving through deciduous
and star-shimmered canyons
under a fox moon,
becoming the wind
and the broad-leafed canopy
exhaling above,
the pebbled earth
and the wild churn of rivers
the mist-soaked air
and gnarled bark of ash and oak,
listening to the rhythm of footfalls
to the music of owls and nightjars,
the rustle of beasts in foliage,
pikes and blades gripped hard,
under the spell of a star-sprung
and haunted heaven,
becoming all that lives
in this leaf-lush and luminous blue world
and knowing as the goose, the nighthawk,
the wolf, the mammoth, the stag know --
yet, one is just waking to the small,
still hours of a summer night in the land of separateness,
each thing in its closed and distant being,
redeemed only by the moon
and the music of crickets
and the presence of a lover who slumbers
beside you, quietly breathing.
- Selected by the League of Canadian Poets as the "Poetry Pause" poem for Sept 26, 2025
Leaving Ogygia
[Ogygia was the island paradise of the beautiful nymph Calypso, who kept homesick Odysseus captive for 7 years, promising him eternal life if he would remain with her forever.]
My sail snares the wind
as Helios lifts his prophetic eyes from
the sea.
Our hearts were not forged
to dwell amid the perfect, clear crystal
of birdsong or the honeyed
fragrance of cleft cedar and cypress,
to endure flawless beauty without end.
Ahead roars the chill smack
of seawater, body breaking joyfully
against tiller and mainsheet
and knowing
that even as we strain toward home,
imagining each longed-for embrace and
aching to begin once more,
to chase the sun past far-flung shores,
that home, like ourselves
and all that weaves the bittersweet
lull of memory
is forever fading backwards and
into time.
- Selected by the League of Canadian Poets as the "Poetry Pause" poem for Feb 20, 2026
A Mid-March Robin
A mid-March robin perched and trilled on my
sideview mirror
in the cathedral silence of an asphalt lot;
a journey of vast, unfathomed distance
lay ahead
–sun-seeped valleys and snow-chilled peaks,
and yet what I now recall is a solitary
bird singing from time’s far edge of beauty and
beyond whatever might befall.
- Published in Juniper magazine, Summer 2024