Northwestern Scenes II
Northwestern Folk Poetry - Part 3
The Chicken Factory livestock truck
audits nostrils, tongues
Blooming magnolia and the starling’s spring song
test eyes, ears
I walk slowly by the dormant crematorium
—
The mystic morning light mingles beautifully
with spring’s soft, cleansing, morning rain on blossoms
The same sun shines upon
Hastings’ frantic pulsing horns-and-holler traffic
Drowning echoes of our first flight from Eden
—
Vancouver folds over unfeeling and wheezes
slobbering anaesthetized blissfully ignorant
of the hurt she causes in masking the pain.
You and I and the clouds become one mass;
Touch the ground and together leave unhelpful tears.
—
Halo-light basks those kneeling down
on unknown-liquid-slick concrete
Vestments of ungrudging giving
Samaritans of Graceful bound’ries
The invisible God, visible
Quintains of a day I walked to work.
On a journey to be more sensitized again. Desensitization is defence; and to not be so protected is frankly completely impractical if not functionally delusional in this city. Sometimes it takes slowing down; one person at a time, to remember where I am. Samaritan to one person at a time.
Sometimes the person is me.
The balance between sensitivity and longevity is precariously thin — but it must be found and like a tightrope, walked. There might be lessons from the Good Samaritan. Let me know what you think.
**Note, I’m releasing new poetry every two weeks instead of weekly, throughout the summer.
Desensitization is defense, yes. Nice poems and prose.
I had missed your last 3 or 4 poems, my friend. I liked them very much.
There are some very well-crafted lines in these last entries. I especially liked “Babylon was never Babylon/ to those that lived within her” and the first two lines of this poem here about the chicken truck.
Resensitization is hard, and frankly, scary, when it comes to the huge abyss of human suffering wrapped up in the addiction crisis. I think my hospital work, to me, feels like a place where I can resensitize in a controlled environment. But the danger is that I feel like I’ve “done my good deed for the day” once I leave, and it paradoxically reinforces the desensitization.