“If you could be anywhere in the world

At this exact moment,

Where would you choose to be?”

I choose the easternmost point

Of Acadia Maine at sunrise.

Cold, salty ocean spray in my face,

Warm thermos of cocoa in my hands

And the promise of a new day

Being made right before my very eyes.

What could be more reassuring?

What could be more solidifying?

To know that no matter

What happened in the days or weeks

Or months or years or decades

Before,

Today, right now, at this exact moment,

It is all behind you,

It is all in your past.

And that sunrise you’re watching

Over cresting crashing white topped waves

In the cool breeze of morning

With the scent of dirt and earth and trees

Carried on the wind that also brings

The call of the morning dove and thrush

And Phoebe-bird,

Is the promise you’ve been waiting for.

The promise that you’re gonna be okay

Because today, today is a new day.

Arrows raining down on our feet,
And yours aren't covered.
None hit our heads but the bottoms of your feet blister.
So take my sole to save your soul,
Because we can't control these arrows or how far we have to walk.
We can't tell our feet to stop blistering and moving
When there's work to be done in places
That aren't here.
Thousands of tiny arrows make their way from our feet to our shirts,
Just over our left *******,
Where we thought our hearts were no longer.

Waiting for the ferry
I found a piece of Delft, or so I thought,
Blue white and shining on the rock beach at St. John's,
Mixed it in with unfamiliar coins of Canada
Dreaming of a foundering ship,
The dish and how it might have looked
Stacked on all the others in a busy galley
Ages back when it and she were whole.

I walked along the rounded stones made slick with growth
And watched the tide sweep out so fast
It seemed the ocean raced to find its home.

You lingered by the picnic tables.
I saw you check your watch six times,
Wondered at your sharp fixation,
Your sense of past and future,
How it might survive me.

Later in the empty bar,
Amidst the dreaming roar of engines
And the splashing underneath our hull
I thought I heard you laugh but I was wrong.

You were huddled by a table
Peering pious in your half filled glass.
The laugh I heard came from a stranger.
A fisherman I came on later on the deck.

He pointed towards a far direction
Misting emblems of his home.
He said he missed his wife.
I envied him.

I was moving far from mine.
The closest thing to memory,
Those foreign coins
And small white fragments
Jostling close to silence
In my pocket.

Listen to the stories

men tell of last year

that sound of other places

though they happened here
Listen to a name

so private it can burn

hear it said aloud

and learn and learn
History is a needle

for putting men asleep

anointed with the poison

of all they want to keep
Now a name that saved you

has a foreign taste

claims a foreign body

froze in last year’s waste
And what is living lingers

while monuments are built

then yields its final whisper

to letters raised in gilt
But cries of stifled ripeness

whip me to my knees

I am with the falling snow

falling in the seas
I am with the hunters

hungry and shrewd

and I am with the hunted

quick and soft and ****
I am with the houses

that wash away in rain

and leave no teeth of pillars

to rake them up again
Let men numb names

scratch winds that blow

listen to the stories

but what you know you know
And knowing is enough

for mountains such as these

where nothing long remains

houses walls or trees

<~>
“I would recommend On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken. This poem is from Cohen’s 1964 collection, Flowers for ******, which deals with the trauma of the Holocaust and its legacy in 1960s Canada. In this book Cohen describes himself as a ‘front-line writer’ trying to understand totalitarianism, and the poems aim to critique his readers’ complacency in the violence of the world wars, anti-Semitism and colonialism. In On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken, Cohen asks his readers to consider how atrocities ‘that sound of other places’ also ‘happened here.’ He wants us to remember the lives of real people, to remember where people have found solidarity and protection, as well as how they have been oppressed because he is concerned that the stories that are told about the past will make it feel distant and unreal.”

KAIT PINDER, assistant professor of English at Acadia University

We are found
The lost souls of a generation
Tossed into the fire
To sink, To Swim
To......survive.
Here we are
At the start of it all
In Silence undetected
We reach for the stars
Just to fall short
But to succeed in something greater
We are the future.

Though
Their bodies are benched on Church Street,
Their minds are capable
Of startling flight,
Time travel,
Trans Universe travel,
Invisible train travel
They take the blue line -
"All aboard for Valhalla, Inferno, Acadia, Hades,
Bliss, Abandon, Elysium, Pandemonia ..."
They sway clutching the overhead strap,
Eyes glazed, rheumy, vacant, or fiendishly happy,
Transfixed by the scenic whir that no one can see
But them.

I've been waiting for a while
Waiting on the bus, lingering Acadia road
With stark canary smiles
Tires sliding south, piercing lights through the snow

The grouching driver smiled for a buck
But it wasn't my number, just his luck
The face mistook

The madmen piled on top of one another
Spitting stories of strenuous times
Though they complained about the weather
They would do so well to shine every dime

The bus came and noticed my suit
The others followed me in pursuit
Of their boots

I am happy looking at the snow
And only feeling through the cleanest window
But everybody's in a jiving craze
I'm amazed or maybe I'm enhazed
By the speed of streets
And my halted heat

The participants of equilibrium
Took attempts at a kinetic sleep
Instead they chant, in dulled delirium
And take a peek at their synthetic keeps

Neon lights and thinking, dancing strobes
Stamping all their prints into my lobe
As the traffic probes

The wolf in withered wool
Talked about the finest winter day at the start of fall
His owner pulled a spool
Out of her spine, turned it to money, aimed a gun at her own gall

People were aroused ‘till they were pale
And the snow took on the visage of hail
It had us all impaled

A preacher in the back carried the thrall
Of every play and soon denounced them all
Then every mind’s speed-o-meter broke
The bus in that moment served to provoke
The red lights have stalled
But I am simply staring at the wall

The beautiful marmalade-
Haired lady was a victim of the locks of fate
As the buses fade
Onto pavilions of blurs into oblivion’s gate

The passengers sink past another precinct
The districts become less and less distinct
Vision is extinct

The cosmic eye’s offspring
Held a mundane life of bounding over mounds of salt
They came off of spring’s
Offering and found the true, world-collective gestalt

They fret over the facets of fossils
They seek to shine on acrimonious ant-hills
Passion is distilled

The merriest of people lie in songs
And do not feel bothered to belong
But when the bus transitions to a train
The vindictive vain are doused in pain
Queens on their knees
In well-ragged fleece

The bellowing bell-maid
Rang a tune that sang the smells of Familiar Arabia
The sums that we all paid
Meant nothing at all as golden sands enshroud grey Acadia

The replicated people do not dwell
Or belong inside my newfound well
While they seek to sell

The curl-headed mind,
Kept and groomed by the spotted hand of mercury
Grabbed the leashes of the hind
And repeated tales of great Apollo’s century

In the prints on dunes, he has found
The journey and a lack of solid ground
His bounds make no sound

The beaming castle of the once-gestalt
The gardens of the sky that never halt
The market district full of jubilee
Perpetual and peaceful entropy

Once a fool to look into the past
Now he pays attention to the mast
Once entailed his failure to the sea
Perpetual and fleeting harmony

Now, we sway
Grasp your every day