This poem was the 2021 Tiferet Writing Contest Winner for Poetry and appears in our Autumn/Winter 2021 issue. Buy it today to read the entire issue.
Clearly darkness as we think of it will never come.
The night, mouth agape, gives way to tungsten light.
At the tide’s farthest clasp giant moon snails
drill the shells of littleneck clams,
emptying out their innards
through unthinkably perfect holes.
Come dawn I have not slept. I write of the jays
not seen in such numbers here before,
their electric-blue punk-rocker silhouettes.
Vagabonds like me. It’s still enough
to hear their wings, for the foraging juncos
to suffer my presence while the rockers
go crazily about their business,
gorging on pale arbutus flowers.
A mink, dripping wet, slippers
her dinner across the shale,
the fat-headed sculpin
gasping from her mouth.
Now. Warm rain.
When did the world become
what I have longed for all along?
—
LYN BUTLER GRAY is a pen name. The writer is from Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Her poems have appeared in Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, The Antigonish Review, and Grain.
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