By Chad Norman, World BEYOND War, December 18, 2020
Where the Path Is Melting
How quiet can a child be?
Please, please, bury me
with Hope Sandoval singing,
“In To Dust”
as the singer of Mazzy Star,
as the world becomes more bizarre.
How quiet can a man be?
Thank you, thank you, hear me
with only these words,
my words, no famous singer,
just me, saying these lines,
just the world ignoring the poet.
It is day now, so daylight talks,
in among all the voices of Winter
lodged where cold isn’t a brute,
but when I recall that child
asking for so little when so little
I love how much I don’t know,
I don’t want to know.
Done with the branches’ strengths
you come up the driveway
with perfect legs, playing yourself
through strings and power
left to a song you know I know.
The one left of where the pen sat, yes,
over in the drawer you protect
where the child & man have laughed
over and over because life gives
of course, gives each one a bit
of daylight and darkness.
Something someone will find
out in the middle of a field
where snow drifts over old footprints.
The melting path of all planning
to leave homelands being bombed
or lied to, taken from their children
they believe Canada can help raise,
can help to get to the other side
where a piece of clear ground is found.
No snow, no wind, no opposition
to them simply hoping
to stand and not slip on
any wish to have them fall.
Chad Norman lives beside the high-tides of the Bay of Fundy, Truro, Nova Scotia. He has given talks and readings in Denmark, Sweden, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, America, and across Canada. His poems appear in publications around the world and have been translated into Danish, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, Italian, and Polish.
