Poetry

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