Lea Harper is a Canadian songwriter and poet whose work reflects her sense that "the world devours beauty, and sentences the spirit to mediocrity but also admits the heart its moments of grace in the sudden rapture of minor epiphanies". This poem is taken from her first collection of poetry
"All That Saves Us".
i
At dawn, the island emerges
like the back of an ancient turtle
Campled on white rock, my daughter says
is the skull of a sleeping giant
one breath is a lifetime
the slow centuries moving under us
Belongings discarded among the pines
we lie oblivious to reeling gulls
The sun incubates in stone
A phoenix egg fills the hollows of our backs
We dream blue flame and fruits spring from
secret clefts
You must have surged from the heavens i
in your parachute of light -
radiance, fused by friction
compressed to the density of bone
the accident of an angel
entering our atmosphere
I knew
the moment the firefly brushed my cheek
and a flake of you melted in my hair
when in the dead of winter
you filled the room
with the scent of violets
For days on end
I inhaled your prescence
(supplanting food and slumber)
rocked my guitar and rolled the demons under
(There is no vocabulary
for the rapture
of even these minor epiphanies)
I strapped my courage to treachrous cliffs
because I believed
you waited on the lonely summit
How could you leave me
to linger
in a world that devours beauty
and sentences the spirit
to mediocrity?
I cannot walk the way again
of white sands and sparkling waters
step safely over landmines and scorpions
without your aura
like a tortoise shell amulet
a shark tooth necklace
a feather boa
around me
Forget this altar of silk flowers
They mock the sun
A preposterous picture:
you settling like a child's snowdome -
the energy of a waterfall
condensed to a trickle of words -
the flat eulogies of strangers
What music am I to make
with a voice thick as a rubber band?
The road ends here
and this hardened artery of black cars
inseminates no further meaning
As if a cobweb
could pull down the sky
As if we could meet again
at the intersection of time
where everything happens at once
The singing bird
opens its mouth to worms
You are gone
and nothing rhymes with it
Lea Harper
like tha man in the Andes
who grew small trees from the
cracks of his feet
our bodies atrong, earthbaked..
If we stayed here long enough
beside the drumming waves
we would hear the true music of our names
wed stars to our reflections
Lea Harper
You're no different than anyone else
Why won't you believe it?
The same fears nibble away at us -
the five loaves of fear
that keep multiplying
like fish:
the unfinished work
the unlived dream
aging, insolvency
death
You have no control
over these things
any more than the rest of us
It's the terrible uncertainty
brutality of life
that makes the liquid veins in your hands
so amazing
your smile more welcome than sunlight
on daylily
In the end, all images converge
like rivers collapsing into foam
It's like memorizing sand
I love, you love
That doesn't change
and is all that saves us
from despair
Lea Harper