
Canadian poet and non-fiction writer Lorna Crozier. Wearing her, now, signature glasses! Photo Credit: Elfrida Schragen
Sand From the Gobi Desert
Sand from the Gobi Desert blows across Saskatchewan,
becomes the irritation in an eye. So say the scientists who
separate the smallest pollen from its wings of grit,
identify the origin and name. You have to wonder where
the dust from these fields ends up: Zimbabwe, Fiji,
on the row of shoes outside a mosque in Istanbul,
on the green rise of a belly in the Jade Museum in Angkor Wat?
And what of our breath, grey hair freed from a comb, the torn threads of shadows?
Just now the salt from a woman’s tears settles finely its invisible kiss
on my upper lip. She’s been crying in Paris on the street that means
Middle of the Day though it’s night there, and she doesn’t want the day to come.
Would it comfort her to know another, halfway round the world, can taste her grief?
Another would send her, if she could, the rare flakes of snow
falling here before the sunrise, snow that barely fleeces the brown back of what’s
too dry to be a field of wheat, and winter’s almost passed. Snow on her lashes.
What of apple blossoms, my father’s ashes, small scraps of sadness
that slip out of reach? Is it comforting to know the wind
never travels empty? A sparrow in the Alhambra’s arabesques
rides the laughter spilling from our kitchen, the smell of garlic
makes the dust delicious where and where it falls.
Lorna Crozier from Blue Hour of the Day – Selected Poems, McClelland & Stewart, 2007
(I started this blogpost a number of days ago and in it I included Lorna Crozier and her poetry in a group of some of whom I consider the finest woman poets of Lorna’s generation. I think Lorna would naturally be included in this group if she were American. One of those poets, as of today, is the Nobel Prize Laureate Louise Glück. I still include Lorna in that group with Louise!)
Strange how it works. I start by writing a blog on American poet Danusha Laméris and in that process find a recent poem by her called Dust. Then I thought I remembered a poem called Gobi Dust by Lorna Crozier and can’t find it anywhere. Instead I find the one that begins this blog post. And then I remember the prose poem “first cause: dust” in Lorna’s 2009 memoir, small beneath the sky. Then in the midst of doing all that I remember Lorna’s latest book of poems, THE HOUSE the SPIRIT BUILDS.(Please click here to read my blog post on a poem from that book last year) . It had been nominated for The City of Victoria Butler Book Prize and I scramble to hear her read from it on a livestream on Sunday night. Later that evening she was announced as the winner, beating out, among others, her friend and former student Steven Price for his 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize long-listed novel Lampedusa. Whew! Where poems and writers will take you.