Sunday, October 12, 2008

Prize winning poetry by Sue Blott

Lovers’ Lane

I’ve nicknamed my walking path
Lovers’ Lane this spring.

A messy crow’s nest
perches on a hydro tower
and two crows teeter
on spruce tree tops
like charred stars.
They flap black wings
and caw caw a warning
as the dog and I stroll by.

Between railways tracks,
a pair of Canada geese
crane ringed necks
to watch us pass.
Further along another pair,
less brave,
waddle over steel tracks
and down an embankment
as they scold us
with their honking.

In a driveway
on an intersecting street,
a red-clad toddler
be-bops to the road.
Behind, her parents cluck,
“Come here. Stay close!”

All the birds quiet
and still themselves
to listen.


What Else?

On the back steps, my black dog lies,
fur drenched by the rising sun.
With his eyes closed, his nose twitches
sensing seasons change.
What else to do, this August morn,
but sit beside him sipping tea?

A Mingling Moment

As Emily Brontë walked Yorkshire Moors
with her mastiff, Keeper,
braving fierce northern gales,
which must have ripped through
all her best woollen clothes
to ravage her innermost folds,
so I walk on cracked-egg tarmac
with my black mongrel, Rascal,
down to the Kaministiquia River,
frozen with whorls like heart prints,
beyond which Mount MacKay looms
and beckons with native mysticism.
A rattle of bridge iron
and a drone of transports
combines with a moan from ice floes;
I imagine it is Emily’s skeleton creaking
while her spirit emits a restless groan.
A poem comes whistling on the wind.
“Here, Keeper!” I call and,
in a mingling moment,
see a purple span of heather,
hear sheep bleating
and feel the yearning of a poet’s soul
by a river in northern Ontario.

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