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    Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios
    Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios
    Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios
    Ebook77 pages16 minutes

    Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios

    By Helen Humphreys

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    About this ebook

    Alcuin Citation in 1991 for excellence in book design in Canada.

    Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios is a work in the hazard of retrieval. What sticks in retrospect? Seldom what you would expect, not always the happiness. Otherwise you could train for life, you could actually learn from grandmothers, mothers; poems -- those bodies of lines and spaces -- would not appear unbidden bearing news you hold your breath to hear. Helen Humphreys comes through the rich reproach of the past into the present, a bruise, a beautiful bloom.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateSep 15, 1990
    ISBN9781771312288
    Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios
    Author

    Helen Humphreys

    HELEN HUMPHREYS is an acclaimed and award-winning author of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, a Lambda Literary Award for Fiction and the Toronto Book Award. She has also been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Award and CBC’s Canada Reads. Her most recent work includes the novel Rabbit Foot Bill and the memoir And a Dog Called Fig. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Helen Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario. 

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      Book preview

      Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios - Helen Humphreys

      Derek

      I. Virginia Woolf's Kitchen

      Souvenirs

      What you think you will remember

      is the colour of the sea

      or the kite above it

      snagged on clouds,

      a red and yellow lure

      cast into the sky.

      The pier, a giant spider

      rising from the waves

      on algaed legs.

      The line of fishing boats

      pushing holes through the mist.

      What you think you will remember

      are the sounds of the harbour,

      the scrape of steel on wood,

      the braying gulls.

      It is not that moment

      when your cousin

      handed you the car keys

      and without thinking

      your hand closed over hers

      and wouldn't let go.

      Old Songs

      Floating with you

      on the luxury of new love

      while summer slowly turned

      on rattles of laughter,

      echoes of heat.

      We played old records

      that always got stuck

      in the chorus

      of the song we hated.

      Drank cheap wine out of blue glasses.

      Told detailed stories of when we were ten.

      Outside, houses poised on the road's edge

      were swept red by the sun.

      The wind was a slow finger

      wading through branches.

      There are these moments,

      not thought of as happiness

      until their absence

      calls them back

      using that name

      and sings them open again.

      The Ceremony of Hello

      i) At first a crack,

      space evening left

      that habit would not fill.

      And then your name

      to splash on darkness.

      And now the wanting.

      To touch the sun.

      And not burn,

      or fall.

      No wings to pull the wind

      across the sky,

      drag morning

      savage

      through the clouds.

      No feathers on the water.

      Wanting to leave this world

      where too often speech

      collapses into prayer,

      where dreams rot into fears

      of burning

      of falling.

      Wanting the

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