Tuesday poem #359 : Jónína Kirton : his and hers

his…

to be invited and then uninvited

to his grandson’s birthday

how long must one pay

for youthful transgressions

for not measuring up

to expectations
forged in late night chats

with girlfriends

before texting

before email

before he knew better

hers…

no one wants to know her body aches

that her shoes are not a fashion statement

that words, without a home, linger on her tongue

that between dreams a dampening has taken place

and there is a garden path between them

his love now expressed in the form of a cheque

theirs…

between them there is enough regret to go around

there are the blameless    grandchildren    victims

of a crime no one committed

but all witnessed

Jónína Kirton, a Red River Métis/Icelandic poet, author, facilitator and manuscript consultant currently lives in the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh. A graduate of the SFU Writer’s Studio in 2007, her first collection of poetry, page as bone ~ ink as blood, was released in April 2015 with Talonbooks. It has been described as “restorative, intimate poetry, drawing down ancestral ideas into the current moment’s breath.” A late blooming poet she was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. 

The Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan