I’m slow with posting this week’s poem as I’m suffering from jetlag after a long, involved trip home from a wonderful holiday visiting friends in Ghana. While there, I had to post early as internet access was erratic. The only constant was the steamy heat and the friendly people dressed in bright colours. To my intense pleasure, we were able to visit a meteorite crater but so far, the poem fragments I wrote that day have yet to be pulled together. Same with my poem on Ghana itself.

Instead, let’s look at an older poem:

First Draft:

The wind wants to weft to our skin,
reach our blood, wants us to know
we could be clouds in a moving
sky pushing through trees, pushing
birds across imaginary
boundaries. Wants to tell us we could
see lakes ruffle under
our fingers, type words
in snow for owls to speak
as they pray. We could
moan when we reach
a mountain we can’t
climb, blow travellers off
a pass they’re determined
to cross. We could
have power over walls
if they didn’t block us on three sad
sides. Only one face
will let us speak. And even there
they insulate against our voice.

I wrote this draft while at the Banff Centre, looking out my window at clouds scudding across mountain tops. I had the door open an inch so I could hear the frozen wind’s call, feel it stripping the fibres out of my sweater and scarf. It was a pretty fast write (i.e., type) and as you can see from the final version below, most of the important images came out in this first flush.

I started rewriting it almost immediately. Here’s the next draft:

All afternoon, I listened to the wind
it’s conversation louder
than usual. It told me it wants
to cleave to our skin, replacing blood until
we’re clouds in a moving
sky pushing our way through trees, pushing
birds across imaginary
boundaries. It wants us to know
we could ruffle lakes under
our fingers, type words
in snow for owls to speak
when they pray. And if
we reach a mountain we can’t
climb, we can moan, blow
travellers off a pass they’re determined
to cross. We’d have power over walls,
the ones that face us, not
the three sad sides blocked from hearing
our voice. And when it’s dark,
we can sing a thousand children
to sleep, the sad ones listening
for steps they do not
want. We can rock them
in our arms.

By this point, the poem was starting to take a darker tone, sparked by the image of ‘three sad sides’ blocking the wind’s voice. Though I guess it was fairly dark to propose pushing travellers off a mountainside, especially given that I was getting to know some very nice writer/climbers. I changed that because, through multiple drafts, this became a poem about compassion, the wind’s and the listener’s.

I separated out the two parts of the poem into stanzas (I have been teased in the past about only ever writing one stanza poems but I do use more on occasion, see Glenn?). The first one remains about nature and the travellers are the link to the human side of the second stanza.

Hearing the Wind’s Generous Offer

All afternoon, you listened to the wind, its voice
louder than your blood. It told you it wants
to replace skin, hollow bone until you’re in cloud,
sky moving, pushing your way through trees,
pushing birds across imaginary boundaries. It wants
you to know how to ruffle lakes under
your fingers, type words in snow for owls to speak
when they pray. And when you come moaning
to the mountains, to hide passes behind
your skirt as travellers try to cross.

At night, you can howl for a thousand children,
the ones who listen for steps they do not
want. You can hammer walls, the ones
facing out, not the sad sides blocked
from hearing your voice. Shake
the studs you watched nails
enter, slip through cracks you widened
with your teeth. And then, touching
hair, do nothing but dry the tracks
salt leaves on a cheek, offering
a thought of stars caught
between the darkness of clouds, a brief glimpse
of space they can believe in.