The Many Singings
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Poised on a meditation cushion in the very heart of nature, Antoinette Voûte Roeder transports us to 'the cusp of the in between.' Geese fly, coyotes emerge from the woods, the heart lifts and falls and lifts again. These musical articulations in five movements constitute soulful breathings from the place where language arises, where silence is not void, but alive, awake. Her modulations of song filter a poet's life as through a heron's eye. --Susan McCaslin, author of Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga (Inanna, 2014) These thoughtful poems are compact but substantial. They reveal themselves in many layers. The fresh and delicate descriptions of herons, trees, clouds, and other natural wonders are both tender and ruthless. The poet is indignant about the devastation that greed and money have inflicted on nature but she is more than a "nature poet." Some pieces are penetrating self-disclosures and, though the words seem pared down, they leap off the page. Roeder is a skilled writer who has not succumbed to the dualism of "spiritual best, body is less." She praises embodiment as the "best of all gifts." The last section of the Singings is imbued with the sense of sacred presence while she places the paradox of mystery and naming at the centre. A reader may well sit by a window, gazing, as these poems are read. Singings is in praise of gazing. "Not even poetry," Roeder admits, "approximates gazing." --Hannah Main-van der Kamp, author of Slow Sunday on the Malaspina Strait
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The Many Singings - Antoinette Voûte Roeder
The Many Singings
"Do not blot
the many singings
that bleed into the air."
A stand of redwoods,
young ones,
planted forty years ago,
tall and strong and straight.
Already they bear the silence
of size, of ancient
history.
It is these trees I love,
that I adore, that speak
of life on earth, imperiled
as never before.
Do not blot
the many singings
that bleed into the air.
Their songs are ours.
All Nature Speaks
If everything has language
the Garry oak’s arthritic branches
speak of age, the Douglas fir’s
impossible height, of aspiration
The sudden thrust of a heron’s bill
inscribes its hunger on darkened waters
Water’s ripples tell a tale
of the earth from its beginnings
and medallions of packed earth
cry a decor of drought
All nature speaks
if we would listen
but even when we don’t
this precious talk bears witness
to the aliveness of all things.
Landscape for the End of Time
paintings by Stephen Hutchings
Remember
the trees
mythical beings
many-branched
textured with leaves
The dappled shade
on sandy path
the living, breathing earth,
Earth, the beloved,
briefly held.
Remember
the rivers
broad and sinuous
curving into the
mist, mirror-glazed,
flowing off
the planet’s edge,
planet earth
the beloved,
briefly held.
Remember
the seas, the sky
as at first dawn
when waters roiled
and clouds bloomed
bright and pastel shades
Remember
the last spasm
light unbearable
halo of flames
and our earth,
Beloved Earth,
briefly held, beheld, behold!
passes into memory.
Owl
I was awakened by a sound
so foreign, I thought it was
a dream.
Hoot-hoot-hoot
-short-long-short-
followed by a quick
hoot-hoot.
I want to see you
was my silent cry.
I slipped out of bed
to the window, flung back
the drapes, gazed into the dark.
Again I heard it,
it was no dream.
I would like to have sat
and chanted with you,
"hoot-hoot-hoot,
hoot-hoot."
Voices
Do not deny
the geese their raucous call
their lively flashing
in the sun
their lyrical landings
on water.
The day may come
and soon enough
when sound and movement
and wild voices
will have
disappeared.
Rant of the Powerless
In our headlong rush
towards extinction we
pull down everything
in sight.
Trampling on the backs of
the ever-poor who have always
offered up their backs, we cry,
More oil, more oil
while
the boreal forest swoons, falls
to its knees and ancient mountains give up
their secrets in the violence called fracking.
Monstrous pipelines snake through
sacred burial grounds of native
peoples as politicos line up like cardboard
cut-outs, toothy smiles congealed on faces,
hands meeting in a hearty shake for photo-ops,
while privately they revile each other,
unifying only in their wish to gut all laws
that might slow down the rape