OK, “Belle-lettres” is maybe a bit pretentious sounding. Suggestions other than “other” welcome. But over time I plan to regale you all here with bits and pieces that don’t fit the other categories under “Writer” — you know, poetry, excerpts from my teen diaries, old shopping lists . . .You can’t wait, can you?

So for now, here’s a little poem from when I was 20  that I still like, written before I set out for several months abroad:

There was frost
like salt
on the ground the day of my leaving
there was no wind
or movement in the air
and yet
from the tree outside my window
the grey leaves
tumbled and fell
like wounded birds

And here’s one from 2021,  which won 2nd prize in a contest for poems about the natural world:

REMEMBERING

You:

Cut off in your colonies

of concrete, glass, steel—

the earth remembers you.

It remembers you are the tumult of hooves

tattooing thunder on the shining plains,

the dart and glint of minnows in the warm shallows,

and the coal-black swoop of ravens over blue-shadowed ice.

You are the teeming jungle spangled with shards of light,

and the plash and ripple of waves

as the moonlit ocean breathes in, and out, and in.

As well, the earth remembers you are the final,

sorrowful heartbeat of the endlings—

the great auk, the quagga, the white dolphin…

You are all of these, and you have forgotten.

But the earth, wounded

yet forbearing,

remembers you,

and waits for you

to remember too.

(Written for Cobourg’s Ecology Garden poetry competition in honour of the garden’s 25th anniversary. The theme was anything “green” or related to nature and the poem had to be no longer than 20 lines. This poem won 2nd prize.)