New poetry by Shirley Bell.

Emigration

That was a dandelion year, their faces turning with the light,
illuminating every roadside verge with their yellow countenances
on midsummer’s day as we drove you away from us.

From Thursday’s visa to Sunday’s plane you were unloosening your grip,
at such a speed, I never quite caught up with you. But your face was filled
with happiness, like the flowers’. How strange to see you loping to the gate
without a backward glance into a future in a new world we’d never seen.

Dent de lion. Those flowers have teeth; they bite me now whenever
I think of that hectic flight. I love your happiness, I love your wife,
but I still recall the years you flourished here with us.
And there’s still that morsel of me left that was sad to see you go.

We’ve visited. It’s alien to us. The flowers are different there,
the squirrels big and black; chipmunks don’t come in cages,
we can taste the dead skunk’s odour as the wheels roll over it.
Chickadees and hairy woodpeckers populate the trees that we don’t have.

Everything was like a dream I half remembered from all the films,
where I didn’t see those wooden houses. She always talked to us,
of our buildings made of brick and stone, the narrow roads which hug the
old boundaries, meandering through years of ownership. It came to life.

Hers is such a big country with so much space for you to stretch and grow.
Wildernesses press up against the highways, so many roads to cross
and cross again a continent. This is not a small world

Copyright by Shirley Bell.