Four Poems

poems I've been sitting on (with poet's notes!)

hey there, have you missed some poetry?

here are four poems I’ve been working and some notes at the end on how they’ve grown and what inspired them.

April 2 2025

Wander

¹

for the artists

growing up, the living room walls
had framed sketches of Montreal 

and the paint seemed to whisper you are home now
classmates asked if my family collected art 

my parents bought into what they loved
living is technicolour

where you are is where poets wander
eyes shooting their documentary

view what it is to feel before life
shutters your lids for good.*

The hobbyist art collector knows this
feeling is a set of lungs

your bones are a building with endless
floors

stop and stare at the walls
how much love they pour

Raze

²

(draft 2)

Marathon smoke trails
chase the train, getting hazier
the more west it travels 

along Lake Ontario, I don’t know 
which is faster.
The air is a match 

in a mousehole 
soon we’ll get to dive into
the water from the 

shores in relief.
The land has had enough of us,
the clouds search for

another universe to
save from itself.
The lightning has given up

on trying to strike.

April

³

A Villanelle

On this day, in April’s stairway, 
on the city streets and its endless mutters
a new earth opens up to say

Against all you know, not even crows sway
or whine in their trees. Another route added east for ten kilometres 
of bus lines, and thick fog on this day in April’s stairway

droplets anchor themselves to the wings of a blue jay.
Local gardens soon replaced by a lot, others discovered 
where we are, a new earth opens up to say

we are nature, all the way to our last day
every vein, every root, a piece of the ground recovers
on this day, in April’s stairway.

Sky-high prison boxes shoot up after the frost of May,
runoffs turn to deposits, we’ve begun to usher
in the sleep in beds we’ve made, so a new earth opens up to say

I am the soul that crescendos with the rain
I am a new place, a dwarf planet uncovered.
On this day, in April’s stairway 
a new earth opens up to say

All Light

⁴

(draft 3)

I have images of stopping someone in their tracks.
The arsonist at the gate before they burn the bridge,
the angry before they say something permanent.
We imagine endings cause we’re scared of the moment.
I am never holding the flame. 

Fires are only something I stand still to watch.

I want memories like water, I want to make the waves calm
but also never write their story for them.
Long ago I learned not to attach expectations.
Let the flow do its bidding. 

I have the serendipitous encounters
of a prodigy.
Zack the shop owner starts telling me how the hospital 
messed up his health with a mix-up; there,
tucked downstairs under some construction
(at a vape shop, of all places)
he says, I have to survive on Yonge street, so sometimes 
I slow down, 
I tell young people you should do the same.

Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the gin, 
The quiz is just a game, and the next question’s:
Ask them to promise you something,
I’ll say maybe before I say yes 
without meaning. 

So I have images of stopping someone in their tracks
but if they’re running, I watch them. Still. 

A campfire collapsing
cedar wood blocks sharing 
small, passionate embers. 

You can rev it up on Bayview, it’s 1am now.
We only move too fast on 
unsafe roads.
There’s only the moon, streetlights, and us.
Right now. All light. 
Don’t burn it down.

It’s draft day! I hope you all enjoy these,

1. I’ve been trying out writing poems sans punctuation (a popular feature in some contemporary poets’ practices), letting the line breaks represent the cadence and pauses to breathe. However, I had the feeling that I should isolate one line: “view what it is to feel before life / shutters your lids for good” representing how visual artists share with us, pull feelings from us and teach us. I reserved the poem’s only period and capitalized letter for those lines. Shout out to all the artists out there!

2. Lightning strikes can spark wildfires, often in dry, wooded natural land, but lately the air and sun have been enough, the storms have been a relief instead. After another summer that is hotter than the last, I penned this poem on seeing (and grimly observing) smoke dance in the air while on the train to a neighbouring city, it looked like an eerie fog in mid-afternoon. My heart goes out to those who have lost homes to the wildfire season.

3. A long-held draft from April using Day 4 of sonja ringo ‘s poetry month prompts, running with the idea of a “dwarf planet” being a metaphor for a new earth being witnessed. I wrote half a dozen poems this April that I knew needed a focused eye; I’m growing more humble with drafts I hold onto, fully believing that the poems that ring truest to me are worked on slowly over weeks. This is my first attempt at writing a villanelle, a complex form of poetry with a structured rhyme pattern (I really tried my best!) This poem also inspired Raze. I let it sit for most of April and tweaked a line or two throughout May and June, finally finishing it in July.

April in poetry tends to represent rebirth, renewal, and releasing the emotionality of winter, whether it was filled with joy or regret. It’s a month that remembers and haunts, and in today’s climate, it’s a month that looks different almost every year now. Will lilacs be fooled by temporary warmth? Only to be assaulted by frost at the beginning of May? Will the earth release its passive aggressive wrath on us? How long is the waiting period before the ground can break for property developers to begin their gentrification? Who knows. April’s a month to observe. I feel sorry for the earth.

4. The fleetingness of youth, of health, of intimacy, connections that pass like boats by a lighthouse, nights of affection, what it means to let water slip through your hands and smoke hang in the air and say nothing in protest. This poem is where feeling something vulnerable is all light and good memories if we choose not to cling to them too hard and just appreciate the warmth, the memories.