The Norway Maple (Toronto)

Acer platanoides, chief of the urban arbour:

Like Sweno, the Norwayan king,

A stalwart bushy conqueror

Whose tale the poets sing.

He crossed the sea, invited,

In the reign of P.E.T.

To settle in the City blighted

By the scourging Elm disease.

Standing sentry over lawns and yards,

Limescent in the Springmer sun,

He shaded all the boulevards

As once the umbrous Elms had done.

Hearty he grew, and proud,

For did not the nation’s flag bear his noble face?

And yet he could not please the crowd

Who said this land was not his place.

A healthy wood, the ecologists said,

Forms a living web whose bonds are torn

When invades the foreign-bred;

Native Nature felled, they mourn.

The hipsters pined for the ancient Oak;

And denizens of the southern Beaches—

Academics and artsy, cultured folk—

Liked their garden dinners ‘neath the Ashes.

As the Viking of the land of his birth

Knew monk and peasant feared his call,

So the mighty Maple bloomed with mirth

As the City’s soil came under his thrall.

“The cold freezes not my vital juices;

My roots with relish drink the salt of the road;

How eager they bought into my ruses

As the cane-farmers welcomed the Queensland toad.”

And so Toronto upon the Lake

Was left without a choice to make;

If green the City desired to be,

Submit it must to the Norway Maple tree.

Locked Islands

Iron clouds crackle over the turquoise ocean;

A radio spits static, official and empty.

The plantains hanging over the wall,

Half-ripe, are picked clean.

The yard echoes stony scraping.

Shortwave words translate poorly:

In Haiti they killed a president;

“Cuba libre!” seems more than a drink.

The Minister’s words are smooth

As the airport’s plane-less tarmac.

The chickens cluck quieter than before

As the inbound stormclouds cast strange shadows.

It was “Fifteen Days” for forty times

Before the days were lost in reckoning;

Muzzled men and hungry dogs

And dusty, dismal streets.

Shaky fingers pinch stray rice,

A spoon plays on the ribs of a can;

The tour bus sits idle

By the pretty, silent hotel

Whose owners are exiled in Miami.

“We’re in this together,” comes fat and weak,

Smiling at submission.

The stony scraping ceases;

The arm-hairs scythed off cleanly: good enough.

There are no crops to harvest,

But the machete has work to do.

Mall Rats

The cell phones came in colours

Red, silver, blue, white and tangerine,

Twisting or flipping, bricks and sliders

Bought on reviews in a magazine.

Our meetings were a matter

Of weightiest import,

Peering as we did through crowds and chatter,

The first-come holding fort.

Bus and sidewalk calculated,

The hour collectively set;

The painful parking hour-rated,

Each owed the other his word and time in debt.

The attended face, the hoped-for hail-up greeting

And our conclave shall begin,

The bustling crowd concealing

Us as we seek to sate our hunger, somewhere beyond the din.

The DVDs were pirated—

Anime, crime, or horror flicks—

At the arcade we’d be riveted

To the Street Fighter control sticks.

Fast food and long conversation;

Suburban philosophers, we discoursed as we’d roam;

Children of imagination

Who’d soon not know this home.

Consumerism meant us nil:

We played, we fought, we wandered wide-eyed

In the sanctuary where we’d hide

From a world confusing, cold and ill.

Whatever the academics write,

They know the buying, not the Being

Of silly youths sincerely seeking out the Light,

Nor the savour of Dreams tasted, however fleeting,

On a breezy, moonlit summer’s night.

Some folks had forums, the square and the temple hall;

We had our great bazaar: the mundane, magic Mall.

Painting on a Summer Evening, Grange Avenue, Toronto

by M.G. Warenycia

A caterpillar is marching circuits

Around the window fame.

The chestnuts and linden lush

And perfumed with Jasmine tea

Smother the humdrum Sturm und Drang

As the hot and irritable City seeps outward

Like water squeezed from a sponge.

“The world has been getting smaller,”

She says the truth.

First school, then university seemed to fade;

“They still exist,” she secretly suspects,

Recalling walking past daydream backgrounds of

Faces and voices—but that was long ago.

A year? Two?

Club nights and parties became occasional effort

And then a crime.

All the places become Google images

Alone; all the people become pics and posts.

“The world is getting smaller”—

She paints to chase away the thought

And to lure ghosts

Of Yesterday, Tomorrow and Elsewhere

To make her feel familiar.

And there’s YouTube and Netflix,

Poirot and Studio Ghibli in HD DVD.

It helps and then it doesn’t

When, in the evening through the still-dark morn,

With the cold-sweat panic

To be Somewhere and Someone one isn’t.

Brew some coffee, put on a podcast, paint:

Emergency measures

Wielded with flagrant frequency

That would make dictators blush.

On the canvas, a moth

Has seen a light,

Flaps to fly

And hits the wall of a jar.

The jar is getting smaller…

The breeze at the window is so fresh

It feels wasted

On sleeping nostrils,

The light beyond so beautiful and bright

It aches; she wants to scream

But no one can hear her through the jar.

Downtown Eastside (Vancouver)

Oily pavement shimmers

Painted by neon and headlights

That warm to a false glimmer

Embers of dreams that live only at night.

Toothy brick scours leather-wrapped shoulders

Above too-small skirts and too-tight jeans;

The darkness uncovers

What we least want seen.

The passing cars and seductive signs

Blur into a cosmic river

Drowning those naively straining to divine

Howa bright-eyed child becomes a swine-flock’s fodder.

Pills and experience have inoculated

Against wind and rain,

For appetites must be sated

As the City fats on inner pain

Which dulls the voices saying not to ride

In the foetid truck whose driver, grinning,

Accepts another Offering

Washed in by the tide.

《毛蟲災（加拿大）》

安省鄉野小農莊，
暑天假期多舒暢。
樹木茂盛天氣熱，
孩子暫時停學業。
偶然風景似有怪，
具體遠古很難猜。
屋前田里古榆樹，
鴟梟棲息不舒服。
精神不安何說明？
忽觀天色耳緊聽。
環繞房子黑森林，
瞬間眨眼似來侵。
林邊樹枝忙扑騰，
驚悟今天沒有風。

The Swarm (Québec, 1742)

Winter had fallen, timid and mild,

The herbage springing fulsome and bold:

The apples and maples

Powder pink and fluorescent lime.

Bronze sinews bathed in brine

Salted the sun-baked grass

As the blackbird blared its summer siren.

The habitants’ fields splayed like a fish’s spine

Out of the great River

Whose whisper lulled work-hot heads to sleep.

Ti Yann, hilling squash, came upon a cowbird

And starlings six that lazed upon the shadowed dust.

They startled, but made no flight.

He thought of pie and fricassee

But, seized with the peasant’s eye for omen,

Crossed himself, said “Hail Mary.”

The sun set living flesh to broil;

The farmers in the corn slowed, looked up from their toil

Awaiting the cool hiss of the breeze

That they reckoned rustling in the tallest poplars’ leaves

And waited…and the air was still.

Gazing at the windbreak trees

They saw them doff their crowns,

Foliage sinking as sand in a timer-glass.

Leaning on their tools, they stood bewildered,

Agape at the woods

As gaunt as a cruel December.

In the bones of their toes they felt through the soil

That the grasses and the goldenrod

As if by some witch’s art

Had begun to seethe and boil.

Impelled by unbridled hunger

It came towards them,

A billion knotted bodies

Wrought into one consciousness.

They saw and felt It squirming;

Some swore they heard triumphant squeals;

Some fled to the town, whose whitewashed walls

Were writhing black and brown;

Some fled their Reason;

The lucky reached the boats.

To the very shore It came

As if menace was compassed in Its mind.

Those safe on the ships shook in wonder

At how the Land could sudden bear

More life than it had substance

And mocked themselves as mad

While the solem prêtres prayed

To Dieu for deliverance.

Seventeen hundred and forty-two

Says the musty tome in quill-penned scrawl—

Back when Intendant Hocquart’s hand

Ruled feebly a wild and forbidding land.

Robarts keeps it on a reference shelf.

Leaving that book-lined dungeon,

The City looms fresh and bright;

The soul relaxes in Metro’s vibrant bustle,

But the leaves of the campus maples

Shimmer disconcertingly

In the windless noonday light.

《土生土長陌生人》

背井離鄉謀生意，

山棲谷隱找機會。

晚風淒涼海廣闊，

靜夜多思訪舊友。

虛業無味竟喪心，

欲回加國見鄉親。

然而市民患病狂，

繁榮城市已空荒；

人似樂意當囚犯，

最憎自由男子漢。

昔日街巷已萬變，

土生土長陌生人。

隧道盡頭還有燈？

哪有知己共美夢？

Streetcar Chimes

She boarded the streetcar, a degree or two ago,

Like a salmon, unconscious, going with the flow;

Sealed below the Bloor-Yonge Line,

Wielding as if her birthright

The scholar’s pen and painter’s brush,

The Lake-side ash-grove her Druidic shrine.

Markets bursting with as many a kind

And taste of fruit as people,

Each a brushstroke,

The City painted by them combined.

We are seeking Truth with intrigue and fun

—This she, far too young, did know:

As a lash on flesh the knowing drove her,

Lest the Prize be gone before it was won.

The streetcar passes less often now,

From changes sudden come

Like Jaeger bombs on a starving brain

That left her pondering “how?”

The chimes echo not quite the same

Off glass and steel and plywood shacks from which

Pungent prophets curse the masked-up sheep

That full the waste she once did claim.

A stranger in her newfound home

Who alone in Dreams can roam

In the stillness of the suffocated City’s night,

Hurtling blindly in mental flight.

Robarts Library

It broods over St. George and Harbord Street,

A Brutalist hulk in solemn concrete;

Imposing enough in the sunny day,

A Medieval dungeon ‘neath night’s dark veil,

Spiritual child of Le Corbusier,

Embodying zeitgeist in form and scale.

Bright and eager Scholars the Peacock calls

To its mazy stacks and stygian halls.

Yet stranger stories one perceives within,

As shadows play on the Student’s tired mind,

Not bound in books, but steeped in secret sin;

One heeds the peopled lobbies, lest to find

Things best unsaid, save in whisper and blog—

Ghosts that lie waiting for a daydream’s fog.