Finding the Colors: Recently published writing and photos, December 2021
Trees and Plants, more Kalevala, Energy, Small Pleasures
The Winter 2021 issue of Queen’s Quarterly journal includes what may well be the most beautiful layout of one of my poems, a long poem honouring Belle Island, sacred Indigenous land in the river that flows through Kingston and into Lake Ontario. My photos of poplars lining the road to the island, leafy brain fungus, the island’s maple forest, and velvet cluster mushrooms accompany the poem.
My set of three narrative poems that retell stories from the Finnish national epic Kalevala appeared together in Lothlorien Poetry Journal this month. Two of them were published separately elsewhere, but here you can read the whole sequence of events that happened to the musician/poet Väinämöinen.
https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/2021/12/three-superb-poems-by-meg-freer.html
This next poem, published in the science poetry journal Consilience, is a meditation on energy in various spaces, initially draws inspiration from a 1983 LP called Hearing Solar Winds, recorded in a medieval French monastery by a choir that included one of my graduate school professors. In the energy of this vast space, the sound and all the singers’ senses resonated and were amplified, creating a sonic illusion of light energy. The poem then expands to the energy of outer space—geysers, storms, wind, seismic disturbances, Earth’s spin, the moon’s orbit.
Expansion
hidden in wing-shadow
wonderful wind of a choir
dust of dark nebulae
Saturn’s moon geysers blast icy droplets
Jupiter as Earth’s sweeper
in the planetary soccer game
its storm may spin only 400 more years
your favorite gas giants visible together
where mountains fold
into former river valleys
frost-churned stones
first landing on the solitary moon
astronauts’ cheeks fell into their eyeballs
so much dust blowing on the surface
they couldn’t tell they were moving
like wind at your back in a snowstorm
so much space and air
waves from marsquakes
lean into the curve
fashion magazines recommend
in uncertain times wear a power suit
wear yours when you come visit
wait for gravity’s slingshot
to send you homeward
primordial solar system spring-fire
expands the ring of spacetime
open space feels too close
https://www.consilience-journal.com/issue-7-expansion
This next poem appeared in Months to Years, a journal for writing about death and dying.
Melancholy not only for the old
She can’t read the fine print of the sky,
seems amazed to see airplanes fly by
the window in the common area
of the big-city nursing home,
says she can’t bear to leave her husband
in this room, where men she describes
as sad, ugly and vocal, wait away the days
through dull momentum of routine.
She tells him of a historic house nearby
whose sign says it has been rehabilitated,
and he wonders if it had bad habits.
Strange things occur in this place, where food
tastes like sadness, where it’s difficult
to explain to residents why a busy day
won’t cause blood clots in their lungs.
One woman taps thoughts on the table
before her ideas fossilize. Another burps
a baby doll, tries to close the railway
tunnel doors to keep out the cows.
The quiet ones, their underused bodies
buried in ghost dunes of memories,
grow old in unusual ways.
Existence here will sustain itself by friction
against the sides of nearly empty bowls
reserved for her husband and the others
who can no longer enjoy small pleasures
like polka dots or the promise of lentil soup.
https://www.monthstoyears.org/melancholy-not-only-for-the-old/
I know I will find “small pleasures” on walks and hikes—here’s one such moment from a fall hike in Frontenac Provincial Park, just north of Kingston, published in Tiny Seed Literary Journal.
https://tinyseedjournal.com/2021/12/12/leaf-mosaic/
I was inspired to write this next poem after buying a bottle of fair-trade Palestinian olive oil from the Zatoun Olive Oil company. The founder was kind enough to feature my poem in News from Zatoun - Olive Harvest 2021.
Olive Trees Carry Memory
More than a tree, a symbol
of peace, fertility, hope, eternity,
twenty centuries of memory,
the texture of the land—
stately, gnarled olive trunks
sprout and regenerate
after 200 years of growth,
grace terraced highlands
that hug the southern,
sunnier, windier sides
of Palestine’s hills.
Biblical heartland taken
by force, centuries-old trees
nurtured as family legacies,
bulldozed and burned,
the landscape injured
to make room for a wall,
trees stolen, or now
on the other side of the wall,
instant history for those
who care little for olive oil
rubbed into a newborn’s skin.
An olive branch, sign of life
offered by the dove to Noah
at the end of the flood,
green zatoun on red earth,
language as map,
voiceless in the wilderness,
an idea of home. The trees
look forward and backward,
faithful to their witness,
planted in rows or not.
A just peace, a matter of time.
Note: zatoun: Arabic for olive. With thanks to www.zatoun.com. The "Annexation Wall" is built entirely inside the West Bank and captures valuable water aquifers and fertile lands for illegal settlements, further reducing land and resources for Palestinians and for olive groves.
I’ll finish this newsletter with three pieces of writing about my time in Tbilisi during July 2017. First a meditation on the moon, published in the Winter 2021 issue of Rat’s Ass Review.
No Moon in Tbilisi
I never saw any moon during hot nights
when sweet apricots, salty bread,
mint lemonade and coolness of turquoise
walls relieved heat from sun bright
as the yellow bird in a courtyard cage.
Perhaps moonrise starts its journey
in the west in that mythical land.
Surely the moon shone over Tbilisi,
but I only ever saw sunrise
through sheer white curtains.
http://ratsassreview.net/?page_id=3927#Freer2
A photo essay was published in Synchronized Chaos [see link below] about the city of Gori, Republic of Georgia, where Stalin was born, as well as an unofficial museum of Communism in Tbilisi.
https://synchchaos.com/essay-from-meg-freer/
And finally, we all need more joy about now.
Kingston’s current poet laureate, Jason Heroux, was interested in putting some texts on our local public library website’s Poetry Blackboard on the theme of joy. He included this little reflection of mine for the project, another memory from Tbilisi:
Memory of a Rose in Tbilisi
I had not thought the rose might bleed,
bring its own memory forward,
the irregular rhythm of grief
a message nearly missed
until the day you understand
what a single thorn can do.
But let’s sing about picking raspberries
while joyful human and avian chatter
floats across dry fields sprinkled
with fallen starlight of bindweed,
and how the wisp of thorn
on a raspberry stem can prick
deep as that of a rose.
Live with joy, love with empathy.
Thanks for reading!