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    Ordinary Hours
    Ordinary Hours
    Ordinary Hours
    Ebook68 pages23 minutes

    Ordinary Hours

    By Karen Enns

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    About this ebook

    In Ordinary Hours, the follow-up to Karen Enns' Gerald Lampert Award-nominated first collection, That Other Beauty, we revisit Enns' rural Mennonite childhood, replete with the sensuousness of "diesel fuel" and "hot peaches." Enns also explores the Mennonite exodus from Russia, tracking its faint but unmistakable reverberations in the daily lives of its survivors and revealing the redemptive character of that dailiness. Reading an Enns poem feels effortless: her rhythms and phrasing are so minutely calibrated that the poem unfolds as if of its own accord.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2014
    ISBN9781771313698
    Ordinary Hours
    Author

    Karen Enns

    Karen Enns grew up in a Mennonite farming community in southern Ontario. She currently lives and writes in Victoria, B.C., where she works as a private piano instructor. Her first book of poetry, That Other Beauty, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award.

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      Book preview

      Ordinary Hours - Karen Enns

      love

      I

      Prelude

      Nothing is happening.

      Rachmaninoff plays in the other room

      but there is nothing here. No heavy veils lifting,

      no burning cities or collapsing kingdoms.

      No one is drinking wine and talking politics.

      No one is laughing uproariously in their chairs.

      There are no communists in sight, high priests

      or seers, prophets or angels, no dark horses

      taking to the hills. Not a train in view

      or bicycle, no bells or chimes,

      the light is simply window light.

      There is no moon, no path

      to take you through the underbrush,

      through rain or sleet to clearings and wide vistas

      or a glimpse of lemon trees against a low stone wall.

      No one comes carrying a package,

      an orphaned child or green apples in their arms.

      There are no hands at the window, no doves

      or nightingales perched on the eaves,

      no blooming trellises or dusted flagstone walks.

      There are no tin roofs from which to see

      the domes of cathedrals or the sea.

      No rivers, nomads or sacred bulls.

      The walls are white.

      The floor is made of wood.

      There is absence, not emptiness,

      and something close to echo.

      A Sign

      In June we were carried away by the length of days.

      We walked the streets like lovers, full of the light

      and the whole green, blooming world.

      We imagined ourselves eternal.

      And when the cottonwoods released their white down

      over the fields and the schoolyard square,

      the children playing

      lifted their hands and faces to the sky

      like shepherds toward a star.

      In disbelief it seemed at the time,

      but when I think of it now,

      believing.

      Storm

      Always the aunts with their thick legs

      and the straining lawn chairs under the chestnut trees.

      That Sunday then, a wind kicked in,

      the chestnuts over us were huge and swaying

      and the first drops of rain came hard.

      The aunts began with warnings

      as they gathered up the plates

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