The Bigness of Small Poems – #20 in a Series – Hyaena Season Launches!

Cherish This World

The daughter, for a time, who wouldn’t talk
or look at him, that daughter, tells of her days
and nights on Mandarte Island, barely more than a rock
in the Salish Sea. He touches his tongue
to the sound Man-dart-eh makes in the mouth. 
Says it again and again. Something cracks open  
in his chest. Not like the eggs broken, the dead
chicks still inside, in the pictures she shows him, 
but the others, the gull eggs busted open, 
the prisoners escaped, gone free.

Richard Osler from Hyaena Season, Quattro Books, 2016

Tonight I am so pleased to joining other Quattro Books authors at the first launch of Quattro Books Fall season. Big thanks to my editor and publisher and Allan Briesmaster who has been such an acute editor and all around support.

To commemorate this evening I wanted to include my poem Cherish This World in my on-going tribute to small poems. This poem, I wrote running along the seawall in Sultanahmet, Istanbul. I had to memorize it because I had no pen or paper. When I got back to my apartment and scribbled it down I had to dodge my drops of sweat!

This poem mean a lot on many levels. A description, yes, of time my daughter spent living on Mandarte Island with one of the largest colonies of breeding seagulls on the Canadian west coast. But more. The risks associated with things coming to birth. The chance that something incubated may not make it. Even a relationship between a father and daughter.

But tonight this poem for me is a metaphor of the long journey of my first book coming to print. All that tapping and a book busted free.

With huge thanks to all who supported me on this journey. Now, time for supper and heading off to the reading at Pressed!