Tuesday poem #132 : Jamie Reid : FAKE POEM 21 / WHERE I’VE FOUND GRACE

Under the kitchen table with the flour and the cat dish,
in the kitchen sink with the supper dishes and the bubbles of soap.
Behind half-closed eyelids in the sunlight.
Round About Midnight in the moonlit garden.

Two steps down into the Qu'appelle Valley in April sunshine.
Called by name on the street by an unfamiliar voice on any uncertain gray day,
no-one there but strangers when you turn.
Wherever women are talking and laughing, watching their children at play.

The water that falls from the sky is always a grace.
Equally graceful, evaporation in sunlight.
The fact that the very same water is always falling again somewhere else,
and is taken up again, again condensing and falling, again taken up.
Only to know about this, to be able to think about it: impossible grace.

Surrounded by grace, inescapably, always.

Like the ordinary rain
of any ordinary day.

Jamie Reid (April 10, 1941 - June 25, 2015) was a veteran Vancouver poet who first published in 1961. He took a nearly twenty year sabbatical from poetry pursuing anti-imperialist politics. He published four poetry books, and edited a poetry zine called DaDaBaBy in the 1990s. His most recent collection from Talonbooks is called I. Another. The Space Between. One of his last projects was a manuscript called Fake Poems.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan