March, 2021

Leave something behind, he said.
Tracks, traces, or vapor trails,
better brief than not.
The idea of marking spring somehow.
Kilroy and all that.
The traffic hum and snow melting
in the yard. At long last
coming up for air.
Water running in the eaves,
the sun warm on his jacket
where he sat on the patio
trying to make sense of
what comes after pandemic.

-RD

 

March, 2020

Spring wanted to
come, honest,
like a slow-moving
antediluvian brain
over a white
receding tundra.
It was all about
timing, apparently
and the ebb and flow
of atoms globally.

Nation-state borders
dissolved as you
looked at them
McLuhanesquely on
whatever maps remaining.
Gazes quite froze to
screens and never-ending
press conferences,
dire counselling and
imploding economies.
1929–here we come.

I watched the sparrows
descend desperate
on my morning offering,
the squirrel asleep,
though the sky
felt soft blue so early
in this otherwise world
of gutted knowns
and defeated dreams.

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Behind the pleasant green fields of Golf Channel,

the sexism and misogyny of an olde boys’ club? Wonder what announcer Dottie Pepper has to say about that.

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The best things about growing up in the 1960s

were acquiring independent personal consciousness and learning how to become an individual.

Grade 12 and university were where this all memorably happened for me, naturally and instinctively. With a strong dose of music, performance, reading, study, literature, and poetry.

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Autocrats and Herd Mentality can’t stand

facts, empirical evidence, memory of previous history, reason, opposing arguments, critical thinking, individuals, individualism.

Being a conscious, thinking individual and an autocrat or people engaging in herd mentality are totally incompatible. Never the twain shall meet.

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The Power of the Written Word

and Decisive Historical Moments:

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

― Omar Khayyám

In a sense, all we have are words and words matter most of all when all is said and done.

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Favorite Quotes about Poetry

“The crown of literature is poetry.”–Matthew Arnold

“A poem should be a part of one’s sense of life.”–Wallace Stevens

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem is added to it.”–Dylan Thomas

“Poetry reminds us of the richness and diversity of human existence.”–John Fitzgerald Kennedy

“Poetry is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos.”–I. A. Richards

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”–W.H. Auden

“Poetry is a performance in words.”–Robert Frost

“A poet is a state of mind.”–Virginia Moore

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”–Robert Graves

“Great poets do not die; they are continuing presences.”–Virginia Woolf

“The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”–Robert Frost

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”–T.S. Eliot

“Genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.”–Matthew Arnold

“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity–he is continually informing and filling some other body.”–John Keats

“The reader who is illuminated is, in a real sense, the poem.”–H.M. Tomlinson

“Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”–William Wordsworth

“Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.”–Gustave Flaubert

“No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.”–Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”–Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The moment of change is the only poem.”–Adrienne Rich

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Richard Davies, Edmonton, Textbook Author

(Richard.Davies@shaw.ca)

*For a selection of my poems, use blog Search for Richard Davies/Poems.

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Richard Davies, Edmonton, Poet

(Richard.Davies@shaw.ca)

Use blog search (Richard Davies/Poems) to see a selection of his work.

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Richard Davies, Edmonton, Teacher

Grand Centre High School (1972-1975) in Cold Lake, AB

McNally (1975-1984)

J. Percy Page (1984-1986)

Strathcona Composite High (1986-2002)

(Richard.Davies@shaw.ca)

*For a selection of my poems use the blog Search: Richard Davies/Poems.

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Rick Davies, Winnipeg, Silver Heights Collegiate

Billingsley Manor daze. My musical beginnings.

Another day in the life of room 42.

(Richard.Davies@shaw.ca)

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