Where the Path Is Melting

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.

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