Poetry

December 20, 2018 Poetry , POETRY / FICTION

Larissa Sayer photo

 

By

Susan McCaslin

 

 

 

Pumped Lines

 

 

what comes down the line

on lines fraught with soiled oil

 

to undo sacred

chants, hearts’ drum?

 

bitumen-laden pipelines

would stretch from Alberta to BC

 

bringing 400 supertankers a year

chugging through Burrard Inlet

 

one leak, spill or spew, or more

un-homing salmon, whales

 

corporate greed

severing sacred lines

 

true lineage lost

to unpoetry of the machines

 

gains of weighty corporate kings

Gaia’s unmitigated loss

 

 

 

 

 

Ad-Vent

 

 

Each year as we ad-vance

further into the advent

 

of our thingamagig-

graceless-ocracy

 

pre-christ-mess ego-

co-nomy

 

the ego loop

draws tighter

 

scrooge squidges

up his eyes tight

 

signs sighs

over loveless listless sale racks

 

where tinytim’s time’s out

compassion’s candle unlit

 

drugged turkeys’

truncated lives feed

 

our continual feast

lard our larders

 

stuffed with stuff

we are unselved, shelved

 

on our own listless lists

though for all we know

 

eastern stars are still rising

angel hymns falling

 

on inattentive ears

 

 

 

 

 

Susan McCaslin

Susan McCaslin is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry, including her most recent, Into the Open: Poems New and Selected (Inanna, 2017). She is a Thomas Merton scholar who has recently collaborated with J.S. Porter on a volume of creative non-fiction, Superabundantly Alive: Thomas Merton’s Dance with the Feminine (Wood Lake, 2018). Susan resides outside Fort Langley, British Columbia where she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect an endangered rainforest along the Fraser River. www.susanmccaslin.ca

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