Poetry

AFP photo

By

Penn Kemp

So Far Sitting Pretty

While Hurricane Harvey harasses Houston

While Earthquake 8.1 devastates Oaxaca

While Irma’s Eye widens over Florida Keys

and Trump remarks, “Just get out of its way”

While wildfires torch pine forests whole and

crossing continental divide, evacuate towns

While Trump’s toddler tantrums go nuclear

to defy Kim Jong-un’s asinine missile taunt

While race hatred rages in white supremacists

and America turns her tough back on Dreamers

While refugees capsize in unforgiving, fraught seas

While Britain’s Brexit divides ancient allegiances

While Buddhists slaughter Muslims in Myanmar

While women are executed in dishonorable killings

While nightmares confront war game apocalypse

and brinksmanship totters on the edge of Equinox…

*

Then tomatoes gleam scarlet in the green of harvest

and hummingbirds linger in sun before migrating

Caterpillar chrysalis becomes bright new Monarch,

folding and unfolding stiff wet wings for first flight

While September long shadows our yard in semi-annual

balance between light and dark. What can we maintain?

We have read about that perfect summer of 1914

before the dam burst in bloody floods of war

We recall an azure morning behind twin towers,

scorching flame brilliant on vertical pure white

We do not know recompense. We prepare equanimity

In a world out of control we are not without hope

Hope is left for last after all evils flee Pandora’s box

In calm arising before catastrophe, we sit and wait

Sitting ducks, perhaps, yet ducks with luck, imminent

ingenuity, feathers still unruffled by storm impending

Penn Kemp

Penn Kemp is an activist Canadian poet, playwright and editor.  Her latest works are two plays celebrating local hero and explorer, Teresa Harris, produced in 2017 and published by Playwrights Guild of Canada. Recent books include Barbaric Cultural Practice (quattrobooks.ca/books/barbaric-cultural-practice/) and two anthologies edited, Women and Multimedia and Performing Women (http://poets.ca/feministcaucus/livingarchives/). See www.pennkemp.weebly.com.