BY LENORA STEELE
After the Madness
after Portapique
Today I read my home is burning.
The country roads along
the shore ignited.
Unmeasurable despair blazes
a trail of savagery through the little village
where my mother grew;
where she learned to dance,
to read, to pray. They say people were
ambushed, parents shot dead while
their children, secure in their car seats
looked on. Homes razed. Mounties murdered.
Lives picked clean by another white man’s
madness and I am sorrowing, caught in an
epidemic I cannot leave this island.
Someone sent a picture of home tonight,
not of the horror or the grief.
Not of the terrific tragedies but of home,
our home at twilight a bedside lamp burning in
an upstairs window.
Striped Bass
It doesn’t look dead, lying
like that its
one eye staring up at me,
but it’s dead alright, decapitated
by the fisher’s blade, waste thrown
in to feed the turtles and the gulls and
it is grotesque, a body-less head shining
opalescent and perfect before
the tide draws away and the flies find her.
And what was in her when
she took the bait,
swallowed the hook? did she taste
her future, catch the scent of cast iron?
Pulled through the ceiling of
the world, falling up into the light
was she amazed?
Lenora Steele’s poetry and short prose have been published in Canada, Ireland, and the US, in Event, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, Wow, Cranog, The Antigonish Review, among others. She lives where twice a day the tidal bore funnels a hundred billion tonnes of brine up the Bay of Fundy into the Cobequid Bay & the Salmon River reaching her home in Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada.