Here are two evocative poems by Kootenay Shambhala member David Marshall.

What She Told Me

The river’s voice
tongues these rocks round, or,
rock and water together
make this music. Changing
with weather, the seasons,
dry years and wet,
now a whisper, then
a bleached log roared
high above our heads.

Stories of flood years
told in a river voice.
A quiet engineer
who built on the only dry land
left at flood’s height,
an eleven-year toothache
of a neighbor who built
too cheap to bother.

Our gaze in the mornings
probed water like an ouzel
dipping stone fly breakfast
from quiet pools.

When you look deep,
river water ripples
like muscle
and the woods flow, too.

Rain water, snow melt,
drought in summer.
The river is an artery
pulsing out a mountain’s life.
Floods speak a mountain
stone tongue to the sea;
sea foam becomes salmon
in her answer.

The river tells one story
in many voices. Rocks
hold the riverbank for our house,
flood logs wait upstream.
Bank people rootless
as mayflies, water-dancers.
Not even the river
stays.

* * *

There Is No Cure

Because hunger can devour any beauty
the white-winged dove blessing blue sky
will die by the hawk.

Because violence feeds on fear,
the hawk will die
in a metal hail of ignorance.

Because peace threatens power,
quiet champions of peace
die by the hands of torturers.

Though peace will endure as long as power
and ignorance dispelled will dispel fear
and we will still crave beauty strong as any hunger,

There is no cure for living
with a broken heart.

Tags: community artwork, David Marshall

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Arts and Poetry, Local Announcements, Pacific Northwest, Regions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a comment.