DEPICTION for El Jones As I heard the laughter become the weeping and the weeping become the laughter all that the laughter tries to hide, no signs of the life lived there I've always noticed how dirty snow can get. She was looking for the page on the stage fallen, taken when the wind sang. A stronger time I ask the door about but it has taken too many knocks. A stronger scene I ask the window about but it has taken too many closures. A stronger unity I ask the home about but it has taken too many renovations. Marry me to the sky even though I married a woman. We have to make the roses grow. I saw a woman walking with a leash around the neck of a blue shadow painting the dirty snow. The only thing meaning anything to me at the moment are the starlings preening in the sun, in the snowy cedar trees. When I watch them and their remarkable hunger as the feeder on the front-deck offers a variety of adored seeds. All of this version, this depiction to be taken as the life I am living where some of those closest to me are eager, are willing, continually to take a stand for what I stand against. The lies about an uprooted Muslim family and all the Muslim families that have stayed alive to make such a choice I have no idea about, and I believe those closest to me have no idea about. How to find Canada, how to believe again it is where a freedom is rampant, it is where it is worth what it takes to rebuild the lives of those families who somehow have managed to say, “We can, and we will.”
Chad Norman’s most recent books are Squall: Poems in the Voice of Mary Shelley, released this spring by Guernica Editions, and Selected & New Poems, from Mosaic Press. He lives in Truro, Nova Scotia.
See also: Who I move beside, a poem by Chad Norman
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