The Lords and Ladies of the Fermi Bubbles–Penn Kemp and Harold Rhenisch

The Crows of the Fermi Bubbles,
love to drop sticks into blue wells 
of mascara and blind justice,

and to crack jokes from the horse chestnuts,
passing them along from branch to branch to branch
under a sky flowing straight up,

but it is no longer the first day that all humans left the Earth,
and that water drop has long ago realized
that her Moon has been walking slowly home.

Now, the Earth’s entire skin was filled
with blue light. Her rift zones have opened the ear
of an iris in readiness. Today,

I set out to rake the gravel in my Crater
in concentric rings,
to see if my mind is flowing yet,

but the Crows have me charmed,
I see only the blue of their feathers,
not their blinding darkness.

Once, Thought held herself open,
but the longest words are starting to be heard,
the ones that the Crows picked up 

when they too were eggshells
of light surrounding nothing
at all.

The first generation of stars,
the ones who taught crows to sing
so beautifully are dead now, Thought knows,

but the Crows, all smart and shiny, fly on 
into my Crater,
where there are still wind gusts, with gifts:

silver spoons, a pearl earring,
a note from one of Taylor Swift’s songs,
one of the flat ones,

with just enough of a hollow
to hold a drop of water.
They come because the pebbles here are their eyes. 

They have been falling out for a long, long time.
And so every step I take is seen from below, 
and beside, and above at once.

Yours, too.

***
Penn Kemp has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication (Coach House, 1972). Kemp has long participated in  cultural life, with 30+ books of poetry and prose; seven plays and multimedia galore in collaborations like http://www.riverrevery.ca. She was London, Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate. Recent poetry collections include the co-edited anthology, Poems in Response to Peril for Ukraine: https://www.rsitoski.com/poems-in-response-to-peril#:~:text=Canadian. Her latest, Incrementally, on https://www.hempressbooks.com/authors/penn-kemp.

Harold Rhenish has published more than 30 books, including the non-fiction works Tom Thomson’s Shack and The Wolves of Evelyn, both nominated for the B.C. Book Prize. He lives in British Columbia. https://okanaganokanogan.com/author/rhenisch/

Category : 27: March 24, Uncategorized