Poetic Memories

I lived on Texada Island for eight years. I moved there with x, at the age of twenty - eight, to begin a new life away from the streets. This is where I truly began to find myself. Those eight years were spent in deep introspection as I wandered through the forest, or worked in my garden, or sat with my pet rabbits in their yard. This is where I first begin to write seriously, and to participate in public poetry readings. It was a time of wonderful inspiration for me - I wrote hundreds of poems and short stories, I wrote my first book (my memoir), and a novella.

This morning I've been reading through my poems, to put some of them into a little collection. A lot of memories are brought back to me through these words I strung together nearly a decade ago. This is one of them....

One crisp winter evening, I attended a poetry reading with another woman my age. Susan was a very different sort of person. When I met her, she was living alone in a tiny one-room shack in the forest. She'd been living there for the past seven years. She was quite shy, and going through her own struggle to understand who she was. We recognised in each other, a kindred spirit, and often took the small ferry together for the half hour crossing to Powell River where the poetry readings were held.

On this crisp winter evening, we returned from the reading around ten p.m., and walked off the ferry together to stand at the side of the road with our thumbs out, hoping to catch a ride home. We both wore long skirts and rubber boots. Each of us carried a folder with our poems inside that we had read that evening. As we stood there in the moonlight, a man and his young daughter called to us from the gate leading to the open pit limestone mine. He wanted to show us something. Neither of us knew him, but we went over. He told us he worked in the mine, and asked if we would like to take a tour. There was something 'magical' about the scene - something very innocent, as though it was happening in an earlier time. The man and his daughter were so sincere, we couldn't help but go with them. The four of us climbed into his truck, and he proceeded to take us around the edges of the open pit. His truck only just fit on the narrow road cut into the hill of earth, gradually spiralling upward until we reached the top. Here he parked. All of us stepped out of the truck to stand on the edge of the cliff and view the lights below with their reflections on the velvet sea.

Throughout the hour that we were together he described the place as he saw it, in such poetic language the scene was transformed in my eyes. For him, the mine was not an ugly scar upon the earth, but a work of art. For that brief moment in time, Susan and I were allowed to share in his vision. The following day I wrote a poem....

MOONSCAPE

Yesterday two women in long skirts,
boots like Catherine Hepburn,
clutching poetry they had read that evening,
slipped into another time and place
Young man with his daughter beckoned from that doorway
the women crossed the threshold and stepped into a dream
lighted by a melon moon

Like sailing through midnight sky
all that vast black
four bright souls pressed together
climbing ledges cut into ancient ground
Beyond the limerock cliffs
displays of light like rubies and emeralds
drifted on velvet, ebony sea

(and the child is so proud of her father!)

Turns taken to climb up into sky
the women lifted to first rung 'Watch your step!'
skirts billowing, sensation of years long faded
Here is a place where eventually the sea
will creep back in - a salty lagoon created
if only they would open the wall, that sea
would pour in today for us