During the early seventies during my university days, I had a brilliant and widely admired poetry teacher, Rona Murray. A major poet, she was also a playwright, and had the sensibility of those who don’t quite belong. Brought up partially in the British Raj, she wasn’t quite British nor even fully Canadian. Perhaps that sense of being the eternal outsider is what united us.
She was kind enough to pay attention to me, a ‘mature student’ trying to catch up. She thought I had it in me to become a poet. Alas, I might have had it in me but never bothered to bring it out. After I graduated, I became her friend, met her husband the great potter Walter Dexter, and proceeded to not write all the poetry she believed I harboured. Belatedly, I find myself working on a longer and so far, unfinished, Pandemic Poem with the working title, 4Seasons of Unreason. Meanwhile, I want to give my readers something to savour. Here are short excerpts from her Collected Poems published by Sono Nis Press in 1974. Murray’s signature is her visceral attention to the body as a metaphor, and to the physical world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. On reading her poems again I am struck at how they resonate in this post pandemic purgatory. Some seem to be written precisely for this time and I can only wonder at the power of poetry to illuminate as well as eviscerate so called reality.
From Ootischenie, poems written while visiting an abandoned Doukhobor settlement in the Kootenay district of British Columbia. The Doukhobors were a religious sect fleeing prosecution in Russia and their name means “Spirit Wrestler”. It seems clear to me that we are all wrestling with spirits, dark and light, in the after-math of the pandemic. We have become Doukhobors without realizing it, especially since their most radical wing was known as “The Sons of Freedom” who protested agains the Canadian government by taking off their clothes and singing around a huge bonfire. Truckers and other radicals, please take note: They were just a bit early to what is promising to be a big bonfire of all the Canadian Vanities next year, when we will try to resurrect our dead Democracy with an election. It seems a long way off…
I
After the anaesthetic is over
the tumour removed
and the patient not dead
there are other things to consider…
…………………………………..Surgeon in your comfortable house/food on the table
white uxurious bed/instruments neatly catalogued
sweetly efficient/Beatitudes almost
did you consider? Have you done a good job?
X
Today
we searched headstones/for a name
Boy in the ground a year/long bones(reaching for manhood)
linked under ice
XIV
Let us note
this man or that woman/their ghosts hovering over them
the minutiae of their lives/swept away
nothing left but mountains/weeds though cabin floors
roofs bending into inverted arcs/under snow
XV
What is there to say of this country/where boys and young men die so easy?
I move through the regular ritual of the funeral/seeing a woman’s face
stunned as an animal is stunned/with an iron bar/before its slitted throat opens
and I recall sun on tombstones in January
XVIII
I celebrate the body of the earth/each particle/particular and absolute
grain/flake/eye bright or dying/each hair/of every feather/of every wing
geometry of agate/mysterious as seas/where grasses undulate and make/cloudy transparencies /filamented moth’s wings/skeletal leaves/snow falling
tentacles of ice/hoar frost on/barb and stem/winter solstice/silence
I celebrate/bulb beneath the sod/egg within the goose/sun burning/all craft/this house /worms’ hieroglyphs upon the centre post/cedar limbs holding up the roof/stars moon madrigals/mountain light
XXXI
And I am left/to record their deaths and signals/through the dreary afternoon/those whom the gods love die young/but we grow old/pasturing on ragged grass/trying to fulfill the signs/only half imprinted/in the ruins
for God’s sake hold my hand
XXIII
We funnel into darkness/without ritual to mark/the dying
love me Love
I am dying
But here it is said passionate psalms are sung in Russian
no meat is eaten/and war is refused/since killing/is killing christ/in the other
and when the promise appears/they burn their possessions/sing naked around fires/and dream again/of pilgrimage/persecution/redemption
EPILOGUE
three white duck/on green grass/one/behind/the other
and a million/ aspen leaves/in a gold sky
What further?