✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Dead Poet | Al Purdy

canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca · 298 words · saved by 1 readers

I was altered in the placenta by the dead brother before me who built a place in the womb knowing I was coming: he wrote words on the walls of flesh painting a woman inside a woman whispering a faint lullaby that sings in my blind heart still The others were lumberjacks backwoods wrestlers and farmers their women were meek and mild nothing of them survives but an image inside an image of a cookstove and the kettle boiling — how else explain myself to myself where does the song come from? Now on my wanderings: at the Alhambra's lyric dazzle where the Moors built stone poems a wan white face peering out — and the shadow in Plato's cave remembers the small dead one — at Samarkand in pale blue light the words came slowly from him — I recall the music of blood on the Street of the Silversmiths Sleep softly spirit of earth as the days and nights join hands when everything becomes one thing wait softly brother but do not expect it to happen that great whoop announcing resurrection expect o

Canadian Poetry Online | University of Toronto Libraries | Al Purdy UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LINKS Canadian Poets, Contemporary Canadian Poets, 19th Century Representative Poetry Online Al Purdy : Poems Biography / Poet Home | Poems | Writing Philosophy | Publications | Criticism | Other Information The Dead Poet Al Purdy From: Beyond Remembering - The collected poems of Al Purdy . 2000. I was altered in the placenta by the dead brother before me who built a place in the womb knowing I was coming: he wrote words on the walls of flesh painting a woman inside a woman whispering a faint lullaby that

Explore this link on the map →

related reading