Congratulations to the joint winners for the May 2021 Poem of the Month: Martin Christmas for Not skimming lightly and Geoff Johnston for Braid, as selected by 2021 FSP Anthology editors Louise Nicholas and Judy Dally.
Martin Christmas
Not skimming lightly
You stand at water’s edge,
Outer Harbor boat ramp.
The water ebbs and flows gently.
Across the way
the Sea Span New Delhi
loads containers.
Methodically the crane lowers
each container onto the deck.
In India, day by day,
Covid virus deaths methodically rise.
At Outer Harbor, an Indian father
and his 2 kids exit their Nissan sedan
at the top of the ramp.
The brother and sister run down
to the water’s edge,
and throw stones into the sea.
‘He skimmed!’ exclaimed his sister.
‘I taught him how to skim’.
The banks of the Ganges
are covered with thousands
of unmasked worshipers.
Who will teach them not to die?
19.2 million infections by May 2021.
212 hundred thousand deaths,
and rising sharply by the week.
At Outer Harbor, the 2 kids laugh as they
suck up the sea air.
In New Delhi, an oxygen emergency
has been declared.
People are gasping in the streets.
Geoff Johnston
Braid
(Residential Schools in Canada, circa 1895)
Would you cut my hair
release me from my pagan ways?
Silence the mother tongue
spoken with the first
burst of lung,
a soothing sound –
like a swallow at her nest.
This is not the name I know
not the saint
to which I pray.
This braid of hair
lies limp upon the earth
when, only one hand
should touch my head.
Her mournful voice
her sad lament.